Wiregrass Ranch (FL) football looking to stay the course

WESLEY CHAPEL, Fla. – It has been over a decade since Mark Kantor took over as the head football coach at Wesley Chapel (FL) Wiregrass Ranch and it sometimes doesn’t seem that long ago that the seasoned Bulls’ leader has been guiding the program.

In reality, Kantor is one of the Tampa Bay area’s more tenured high school football head coaches, with coaching stops at Hudson, Gaither and currently Wiregrass Ranch.

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Turning the page on last season’s near miss of winning a playoff game, Kantor is aiming to take his Wiregrass Ranch squad that’s only over a year removed from playing for a region final, back into that very conversation. To do so, he’ll have an experienced quarterback but plenty of new pieces they’ll need paying attention to the details on both sides of the ball this spring.

“Attention to detail,” Kantor said about what his team needs to work on this spring. “But we got to be able to understand that in the spring, we’re trying to get each other better. So that when we get to the fall, every rep that we did in the spring, is better in the fall. And the details, the last minute things, have to be better than what it was last year.”

Expectations are assuredly higher than before as the team made a run to the third round of the Class 6A playoffs in 2024 before falling to eventual champion West Boca Raton. Now playing within a new district and region, new hurdles challenge the Bulls this time around, with the schedule being one that can certainly help Wiregrass Ranch.

Kantor has made sure the Bulls will see its fair share of out-of-county opponents, with Wiregrass Ranch facing teams from five different counties. Some of the teams are usual suspects like South Sumter, Zephyrhills, but games against Berkeley Prep, Plant City and East Ridge make this a tough schedule this upcoming fall campaign.

With the postseason runs become much more expected over at Wiregrass Ranch, Kantor has always steered to the side of making the Bulls’ schedule tougher and filled with some of the area’s better programs.

“There was a time when we thought we were going to have to go to Martin County and play,” Kantor said. “So we were like, okay, let’s just do it. But, you know, we had the opportunity to be able to get Plant City on the schedule. We called coach Ciao down at Berkeley Prep and he was like, hey let’s do it, which was great. The funny part about it is when you look at it, the guys that are on our schedule that are non district games, they all are in the same boat that we were. Trying to find a game, people that want to play.”