5 SPRING FOOTBALL QUESTIONS: Tocoi Creek snuck up teams last fall. What's next? 'We're here to stay'

The Tocoi Creek Toros are back and ready to charge into Year 2. The beautiful new campus is finished and replete with top-notch amenities for its students and athletes to help them succeed.

The football team moved from practicing at Mill Creek Academy last spring to their own greens at the start of spring practice this year.

They’ve come a long way. The Toros, however, still have some growing to do as a team.

It is, after all, only the second season.

Here are five questions about Tocoi headed into this fall.

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How does the identity of this team look different?

“We’re a little more mature this year,” head coach Mike Kolakowksi said. “We have an understanding of how to practice and of our offensive and defensive schemes. From where we were last year on May 4 to this year, it’s like night and day.”

The Toros are still young but they will have a senior class with some experience. Last year they went 3-5, had some big games, and took some lumps. Kolakowski said that experience will help the guys down the line.

Outside linebacker Antonio Juarez said the team feels more confident after Year 1.  They measured their skills throughout last year and learned who they were, he reasoned.

Now, it’s simply improving from that point.

What’s it like having a senior class for the first time?

Tocoi Creek didn’t have any senior class last fall so the juniors who were default leaders get a second crack at leading the team.

In their final year, Juarez and other seniors are focused on sustaining what they’ve helped build with Kolakowski. They want the program to keep growing and improving.

“We have more leaders this year,” Juarez said. “We have more examples to put out for the next few years.”

“This year, we’re going to focus on getting stronger, getting a lot better and making a statement that Tocoi is here to stay," said VJ Pass.

How does Tocoi feel about the schedule?

The Toros played a good 8-game schedule last year but didn’t go all-out tough in its first year. Kolakowski and his team will see some of the teams they faced last year but they turned up the pressure just a bit.

Tocoi will face Clay, Nease and Bradford this fall, three tough squads — two of them playoff teams — who they didn’t play last year.

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It’s good the team feels positive about where they are, but Kolakowski doesn’t want them to get too ahead of themselves.

“We’ve got to prove that we can play with people,” he said. “There’s no game that we go in thinking that we’re going to win this thing. We can’t have that mentality. We’ve got our butts kicked. Then we came back, and we played some really good games.”

Again, they plan to grow from that experience.

In any event, Pass is up for the challenge and ready to see the teams they faced last year.

“Some of those teams that beat us are going to think, ‘That’s an easy game, again,'” Pass said. “And we’re going to come back and show them it’s not going to be easy.”

How can the Toros recreate and maintain the explosiveness?

Tocoi put up some 40-point and 50-point games last year and had some good defensive efforts. There’s something there.

This spring, Kolakowski and his staff are evaluating their personnel to figure out who goes where best and to find what will make them a winning team.

The coaches want to find out who the playmakers are so they are moving guys from offense to defense and vice-versa often during spring. No positions are established.

“(Once) we have an understanding of what they can do, we’ll be in good shape,” Kolakowski said.

What can be expected of Tocoi Creek this year?

No more excuses.

“We used, ‘Oh, we’re a young team,’ last year,” Juarez said. “That’s not going to cut it. We’re going to put our best out. At the end of the day, the score shows what happened.”

This article originally appeared on St. Augustine Record: High school football: Tocoi Creek still growing, but 'here to stay'