High school football: Diamond Ranch Diamondbacks 2011 preview

Note: This is Diamond Ranch Academy's first year as a sanctioned high school of the UHSAA.

HURRICANE — The wait is finally over for Diamond Ranch.

The residential treatment center for troubled teens has been going through the process of becoming an officially sanctioned school of the UHSAA since the school added football to its repertoire five years ago.

That process became a reality last year, and in just over a week the school will play its first official in-state game when it travels to Parowan on Aug. 19.

"We've just waited for so long. This is finally our opportunity to be in it and compete," said coach Robbie Dias. "We obviously want to make a statement and show everybody that we want to be in the league."

Doing so won't be easy, particularly when kids usually only spend eight to 12 months at the school. And even then, 75 percent of the players on the team have no football experience.

Some have played and are actually very good. In the case of Kyle Atchison, he's the only player who decided to attend Diamond Ranch another season to make sure he keeps his life in order. Atchison is a very good quarterback who's caught the eye of University of Utah coaches Kyle Whittingham and Norm Chow.

At 6-foot-2, 185 pounds, the lefty quarterback recently participated in the Football University Top Gun camp in Williamsburg, Va., an invitation-only camp featuring nearly 1,000 of the top high school players in the country. A baseball player his whole life, Atchison had never played football in his native Ohio prior to attending Diamond Ranch.

The youth facility doesn't get a lot of big guys, so the offensive line is usually made up of smaller players who've been taught how to block.

If the line can come together this season, tailback Anthony Altwood out of California could benefit in a big way.

Collectively, Diamond Ranch will have between 35 and 40 kids play football this year. The challenge is getting them to play together as a team quickly.

"I think it's going to be a lot different than we're used to. These coaches (in 1A) are awesome coaches, their boys have grown up playing together," said Dias. "It's tough in our situation because a lot of kids are used to doing it their way, and we have to bring them together and start from scratch."

Diamond Ranch went to the Kanab camp in mid-July, and Dias left the camp believing his team can be pretty good in 1A this year.