The Wright City football team played three separate mini-seasons in 2026.

First, the Wildcats endured a rough four-game opening stretch against a quartet of talented teams, losing each. Next came three winnable games that the team won, followed by a four-game stretch when Wright City was decimated by injury, losing each to finish 3-7.

Wright City’s up-and-down campaign ended last Friday with the 46-20 loss to Fulton 49-20 in the Class 3 District 4 quarterfinal round.

That was a lot to live through, senior back Benji Rodriguez said.

“I’m so proud of these guys,” Rodriguez said. “No matter what, these guys all came in and put in the work, every day. All the way from freshman year, I’ve seen each guy grow. I love all my boys. This season was rough because those hard games at the start affected us, and he had some injuries. We had new guys step in, and we did get some nice wins, but the injuries piled up at the end, and they hurt us.”

Still, Coach John Klekamp said that the stretch of wins over Mark Twain, South Shelby and Van-Far showed the team’s capabilities when near full strength.

But, in the end, Wright City was nowhere near full strength as the team used a multitude of quarterbacks against Fulton in the finale due to injuries. That was after the team had already lost starting quarterback Kayden McCurdy to an injury, which kept him out of the final game altogether.

“You go into a varsity game thinking you need at least two guys,” said Klekamp about the quarterback situation. “Then you need to at least have a plan for a third. That plan went to the moon. Injuries are an unfortunate part of this game. Kaveon (Schulte) did well. We knew Kody (Kneemiller) could do a lot, then he went out with a head-to-head hit. Our job as coaches is, when you get handed adversity, to make sure we battle through it. The kids did that.”

Wright City did manage scores in the loss on an 11-yard scoring run by Rodriguez with 3 minutes, 20 seconds left in the first quarter, a 20-yard pass from Kneemiller to TJ Hamel with 7:07 left in the first half and a 55-yard Zamarion Rawlison run, which closed out the scoring with 3:19 to play.

Rawlison said that he felt his run was representative of the team’s effort all season – the desire to not quit, even under difficult circumstances.

“Somebody almost caught me,” Rawlison said. “I still scored. This year was a bend-don’t-break mentality. I don’t care what the score is, I’m going to go 100 every play.”

Junior tight end Jonathan Cole echoed his teammates and coach, saying the fortitude within each member of the team allowed the collective to achieve what it did.

Cole pointed to the underclassmen who stepped up as a group and played valuable minutes.

“My guys have been battling through tough situations all year,” Cole said. “Without our depth and our young guys, we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish the things that we did. Our scout team works hard every week to get us ready. This was just an amazing group of young guys.”

With the depth and youth pressed into service this season, Cole said he’s excited to get to work right away with the vision of making his senior football season a special one.

Cole said he wants more than just special, though.

He’s thinking about history, he said.

“I was sitting there on the sideline talking to coach tonight,” Cole recalled. “I was talking about how there’s nothing more that I want than a 9-0 season my senior year. I want to make history. I want to be the best class. I want to be the best football team in Wright City history. That all starts right now.”