The Clinton County Bulldogs football team finished its season Friday night with a 49-0 loss against Christian Academy of Louisville.

Head Coach Jamie Miller is already looking at next year in order to get a jump on improving the program.

“It’s the only thing you can do at this point. We need to find exactly where we had our shortcomings. Obviously some of it is in the strength department, so we are going to start working in the weight room. I usually give them about two weeks off then we will start back in the weight room.”

Friday night’s game resulted in the 11th loss for the Bulldogs this season. Christian Academy of Louisville scored 49 points in the first half, but failed to score in the second half.

“We played a lot better. We took care of the football. They started substituting at the first of the second half,” Miller said. “We had opportunities to score and make the score more respectable, but when you don’t execute and do things your supposed to do, it’s hard, especially when you are playing a high caliber team.”

Clinton County had several players awarded with All-District honors. They are: William Stockton, Josh Myers, Dexter Dalton, Zach Woodruff and Austin Stearns. Stearns also received Special Teams Player of the Year for the district and Myers received his second Utilities Player of the Year award for the district.

Miller said even though the game was lopsided, Christian Academy of Louisville showed a lot of class before, during and after the game.

“My hats are off to Christian Academy of Louisville. They have a phenomenal atmosphere there. They are very polite people. I mean they fed the entire team and even the fans who traveled up there,” Miller said. “They fed them for free and came over with trays of hot chocolate and coffee during the game. They were as polite as they could be. They have some really nice players there.”

The football team will take about two week’s off before getting back to the basics.

“We have to have some excitement around Clinton County Football and not let it be just another season,” Miller said. “That’s not our goal. We have to turn it around to where we can compete. I told the guys that out of those 11 losses this year, six or seven of them we beat ourselves with turnovers, penalties, missing tackles, blocks and dropping touchdown passes … We’ve got to get past that.”

Miller is hoping for a much better season next year with a new group of freshmen coming in.

“We are going to work on fundamentals. Obviously we can’t really practice, but we can go over some things this winter. Then in the spring and summer we will look at the things we need to improve on and hopefully have a much better season next year,” Miller said. “We are losing six seniors. Those are some big shoes to fill. We have to have some people step up and we’ve got to have some numbers.”

Miller said his biggest obstacle for next season is getting the numbers out to play football.

“We have a lot of talent walking around the school with nothing else to do,” Miller said. “We have some pretty solid numbers coming up from the middle school. We have sophomores and juniors who will step into key roles this year. I look forward to a much more productive season.”

Miller said he is still pushing the idea around about having first and second graders start into football. He said if any parent thinks their child would like to play football in the first or second grade, contact him or Sherry Nelson.

“All the schools around us are doing that. Right now we are starting in third grade, so why not start them in first and second and give them two more years of playing the sport,” Miller said. “I think it would be really good for the program to start a first and second grade team.”