Coming off a 2-7 season, the Iowa Falls-Alden football team is making a notable switch on offense for the upcoming season. After starting at quarterback, junior Cade Olberding will play wide receiver and Karsen Kalous will move from wide receiver to quarterback.
“He is a playmaker, and I think he’ll actually look a lot better being a wide receiver,” Head Coach Eric Walkingstick says. “I think it’s a natural position for him. We’ll be running with Karsen Kalous at quarterback, and it’s fun because we did this at the last of the year last year, the very last game. And I wanted to experiment to see what it looked like, and it went really well. And I’ll be honest with you, it has grown exponentially over the summer. It is something that looks totally different than it did last year for sure.”
The team experimented with the switch in last year’s optional Week 9 game against Clarion-Goldfield-Dows. That night, Olberding caught six passes for 138 yards and a score, and Kalous passed for 233 yards and two touchdowns. Walkingstick says Kalous has progressed at an impressive pace.
“We try to see how fast they can pick things up and how fast they can transition. I had talked to Karsen and Cade at the beginning of summer about this change, and they’re all for it. With Karsen, it’s crazy to think that he’s been basically running the quarterback for about seven weeks now, and how much he’s grown and how much he’s changed. Week one, he couldn’t throw a certain type route. All of sudden the second week we go passing league, and he’s throwing through the secondary with some really nice touch passes. Some things he couldn’t do week one, he was doing week two. And then there was something he couldn’t do week two, he was doing week three. His game is unreal, and he’s such a competitor. So he’s going to be fun to watch, and he is perfect for this style of offense. He’s going to be somebody that’s going to make a lot of noise.”
They attended three team camps during the summer, and have begun preseason practices. They’ll open the season Friday, August 29 at Webster City.
Eric Walkingstick interview:
