Washington’s new football coach Garrison Carter sat down with the media yesterday to answer some question.

Carter, 25, is a native to Centerville, and knows about Southeast Iowa football. While coaching at Ogden, he took a team without a winning record and built a program that finished just outside of going to the dome last year.

Carter talked about the transition of going from a program that struggled to a program that has had some great success in recent years.

“In Ogden, I took over a team that hadn’t had a winning record in 10 or 11 years, and so that was all establishing the mentality and putting the program in place that is already in place here,” Carter said. “That is one thing that excited me about coming here is that this is not a rebuild, this is a reload.”

Carter added that interviewing with coach Schrader helped him get excited about the job, because they both had the same idea as to what high school athletics are about, and how to achieve those goals.

He also noted that the schedule this year for Washington is one of the most stacked schedules around, but that it will be exciting to see what happens.

“I talked with the assistant coaches, and this is the toughest nine game stretch that we will have faced in quite awhile, and it is exciting. You have Pella and Davenport Assumption on the schedule, who will both be preseason top-five; you have Solon, a traditional powerhouse, who was a semifinal team last year, so just those teams alone, and then you have Fairfield and Mt. Pleasant and some of the other teams from around the area that are up and coming. We’re going to have our work cut out for us every week,” Carter said.

When asked about having to change his colors, he said it was his parents who might be getting more tired of the new wardrobes.

Carter will finish out the school year at Ogden before he comes down to take over at Washington.