Marblehead hopes the landscape changes

It was Veterans Day, and there was no school in Marblehead. That didn’t mean the high school football team didn’t have anything scheduled. Coach Jim Rudloff took his players to a movie night. They saw “Men Who Stare at Goats” at the Salem Cinema.”I thought it was pretty good,” Rudloff said of the George Clooney film. “I don’t think the kids liked it all that much.”The team also held a movie night in the last week of training camp.”We tried to do a lot of different things for team-building,” Rudloff said.That may have been especially important this season. It was Rudloff’s first as head coach in Marblehead and the team was coming off a year that the community would probably characterize as controversial.”One of the goals we set out as a team this year was that we wanted to fly under the radar,” Rudloff said. “Unfortunately, we were on the front page rather than the sports page (last year). We wanted to stay off the front page and focus entirely on football. It took a lot of responsibility on everyone’s part and hard work to do that.”It looks like mission accomplished for Rudloff, a Natick High and Northeastern product who is a full-time special education teacher at Marblehead High. As a result, he and his team are fully focused on their Thanksgiving Day game with Swampscott at Piper Field. It ends the regular season, but maybe not the year: The winner of the game wins a title and advances to the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association playoffs.”To be honest, I just kind of had my fingers crossed and hoped for the best,” Rudloff said. “I didn’t know what to expect?I didn’t realize how competitive the kids were” – even, he noted, when he had the team play Ultimate Frisbee. “It made us a little more successful than I thought we were ever going to be.”The Magicians and Big Blue have nearly identical records. Marblehead enters the game 8-2; Swampscott is 7-3.”Offensively, in the basic sense, we’re the same,” Rudloff said. “We run the spread and we’re centered around quarterback play. Swampscott has a leg up with a very experienced running back, Kyle Shonio. Both teams have good running backs. We have similar numbers this year against the teams we played. I think it will be a bit of a shootout, probably.”Quarterback Hayes Richardson is the Magicians’ signal-caller. Flynn McCormack regularly hauls down Richardson’s passes. Marcel Hardmon has drawn a significant number of carries on the ground, with Will Quigley helping him out.”(Richardson) is a field general out there,” Rudloff said. “He allows us to do everything with our offense, set up the pass with the run, 50-50 pass and run. Hayes allows us to do it.”On the ground, the coach said, “Hayes is a very effective runner. Marcel and Will Quigley run with power and some speed.”When it comes time to face the Big Blue offense with quarterback Matt Barbuzzi and Shonio, Rudloff listed four key players: linebackers Matt Evans and Evan Comeau, returning league all-stars from 2008; nose tackle Blake Forman; and strong safety Alex Haigis, who has six interceptions this year.The coach also likes what he has seen from cornerback Ryan Stanojev as well as the players on the offensive and defensive lines.That talent and effort helped the team rip off an 8-1 record before a loss to Winthrop in its previous game.”The Lynn Classical game was the only glitch,” Rudloff said. “We played very badly in the first half and Lynn Classical played great in the first half. When the game was over, it was not necessarily cause to drop your head. That carried over. We had a couple of big wins over Danvers and Beverly, but a bit of a letdown against Winthrop.”Before the last few seasons, Marblehead found the going as rocky as its coastline. That has changed.”It started with this group of seniors,” Rudloff said, “a combination of them and a good group of seniors last year. As an entire class, they’re very competitive. They don’t mind hard work. Now, for the kids coming up, hopefully it’s contagious. Marble