SCHUYLERVILLE, N.Y. (NEWS10) — The 2022 season was an exciting run for Schuylerville that led to a Class C Super Bowl appearance, but this season head coach John Bowen and company are rewriting their own narrative.

“Every year’s got its own group of characters and they really kind of establish themselves and write that narrative each season,” Bowen said.

Offensively for the black horses this season, the narrative will be ground and pound and it starts with returning dual-threat quarterback, Lukas Sherman who’s still stinging from the Super Bowl loss but has used that as motivation heading into his senior year.

“That wasn’t easy for us,” Sherman said. “Our goal was to win the section that’s our first part that we want to do so after we lost that one it’s kind of been in my head since that day so I’m excited to be out here again.

Sherman has led the way for the Black Horses the last two seasons. His explosive style of play is something Bowen believes opposing teams will be on the lookout for.

“He’s not gonna catch anybody off guard this year,” Bowen said. “I think everyone based on what he did as a sophomore and as a junior certainly has kind of set the table for people knowing he’s coming so we’re excited obviously to have him back.”

The offense also returns three starters to the offensive line. That unit will be pivotal in clearing the way for this run-heavy offense. Senior running back Martin Flander said it’s been a long time coming.

“It’s awesome to be able to play with those types of guys,” Flander said. “They’re great athletes, I’ve been playing with them my whole entire career and to be able to have this combination on our senior year it’s just been such a buildup. It’s awesome.”

The defense returns quite a few faces and coach Bowen believes they’ll resemble what they were a season ago.

“We got a good number of guys coming back this year on that defensive side of the ball,” said Bowne. “We lost again a couple of those same key pieces, but we graduated four guys we got seven guys coming back from a defense that was fairly stout last year.”

In order to win even more in 2023 coach Bowen believes certain things must be executed on a consistent basis.

“The team we lost to last year was an extraordinarily physical team and we’re just going to have to be able to one dodge the uh we didn’t do a great job of dodging the injury bug and then just continue to raise our level of physicality,” Bowen said. “We’re in a decent spot right now I’d like to be in a better spot, but we’ll certainly find out Friday where we stand.”