Ask just about any football coach from B eight-man to a Class 4A league and he’ll tell you games can be won even before a team takes the field.

Some schools always seem to have an edge that has absolutely nothing to do with home-field advantage.

Don’t get me wrong, playing on your home turf helps and a winning tradition is also a key factor in a team’s success or failure. Sometimes a team will just refuse to be beaten even when they are short on talent.

Then you have to make mention of a school’s marching band.

If players aren’t just a bit intimidated when they march the kilted pipers from Notre Dame on the field at South Bend or when the band dots the ‘I’ at Ohio State, they will never be able to pass a lie detector test.

Here at Oak Harbor, the cheerleading squad is one of the aces the Wildcats have up their sleeves.

When coach Pam Headridge’s boys and girls take the field, resplendent in their purple and gold uniforms at historic Memorial Stadium, home-team fans, as well as the opposition take notice.

Against Marysville Pilchuck, I saw a look of envy the eyes of the Tomahawks’ faithful and what could be described as a look of awe from the opposition’s rally squad.

Too often, about all cheerleaders do is stand on the sidelines trying to look cute.

As for the Wildcats, forget it! Stunts are the thing.

Prior to the game I had conversation with Headridge regarding a survey indicating something like 65 percent of all serious injuries suffered by high school athletes were sustained by cheerleaders.

She informed me this survey was incorrect and all that had been done was to take a small sample of reported injuries and then expand on those numbers.

Headridge said an in-depth survey with more accurate numbers is in the process of being conducted.

Also present during our conversation was one of the Wildcats’ cheerleaders who was sporting a knee brace — one of the hinged plastic ones they make you wear after a serious injury. Dots on each side of her knee and a lengthy scar below the kneecap indicated she had been operated on.

“Twice,” she said. “Orthoscopic and a graft.”

She said the doctor messed up the graft and she shouldn’t have been injured the second time.

Was she sitting on the sidelines simply looking cute? You’d better think again!

With fire in her eyes she said she was going to be a cheerleader in college. Not “I want to be,” rather, “I’m going to be.”

You go, girl! You can consider yourself having been inducted into the AWA. That’s Athletes With Attitudes — the right ones!