As Millikin University’s football team prepares for its first game of the season this weekend, Head Coach Carlton Hall remains “Cautiously optimistic,”

The team is scheduled to play Illinois College’s Blueboys at their home field on Saturday, September 2nd, their first and only non-conference game of the season. Millikin holds a lifetime 31-8-2 record against Illinois College, including a win in the Big Blue’s first ever game..

“We are a very young football team,” Hall began, “We only have four seniors on this team, and because of that, there will be a significant amount of challenges when you have that many young kids on the team lack of leadership just lack of experience in general,” 

A team mainly composed of underclassmen, 43 of Millikin’s Big Blue Freshmen prepare for their first football game at the collegiate level. The team’s returning sophomores hold a bit more experience, after last year’s season in which many of them started. 

The athletes aren’t the only fresh faces around campus, the coaching staff is also relatively new to their positions at Millikin. Coach Hall is in his second year as head coach, and the same goes for the Defensive and Offensive Coordinators, Bryan Sander and Dion Wiggins in their respective positions. 

The team prepared for the season with its usual two-week preseason camp, which Coach Hall says went really well. Despite the team’s young age, speed is their biggest strength on the field.  

“I do believe that that’s one of the things that we have as an advantage for us in probably almost every game will play that we should and we will be faster than the other team we play,” said Coach Hall. 

The head coach encourages the Millikin students and the Decatur community to come out and support the team this season. The Big Blue will play their first conference game of the season at home, against WashU. The game will take place on Saturday, September 16th at 1 p.m. on the Frank M. Lindsay Field.