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Steamboat Springs — Once the morning frost thaws, John Svoboda is the first person to walk onto the Hayden High School football field.

For the past 10 years, the retired Hayden teacher and coach has taken 15 gallons of paint and up to eight hours - if he's painting from scratch - to customize the Tigers' pitch with a design all his own.

"I'll grid it out like the ancient Egyptians, take it off a paper drawing and just enlarge it, but a lot of it is still freehand," Svoboda said Friday morning, as he brightened the outline of a massive midfield carnivore with a stream of white paint. "We did a different one for homecoming, but with the playoffs we wanted to do something different, like a tiger leaping through a sheet of paper."

The work doesn't end there. It will take Joe Skufca, the high school's director of maintenance and operations, at least another three hours to line the field. And then the duo has to be off the field to finish the final end zone touches - maybe some paws or a tiger, depending on how much paint is left - before the team takes over for what could be its final practice of the season.

All this in preparation for when the quiet field transforms at 1 p.m. today, as football teams from Akron and Hayden, two Colorado towns of less than 2,000 people, square off in a Class 1A state semifinal football game.

Svoboda sized up Hayden student-athletes for 15 years as an assistant football coach, and for nine years as the shool's head wrestling coach.

He knows a good team when he sees one.

"Hayden's jazzed," said Svoboda, who also drives the Tigers' bus to away games. "It will be a good game that anybody can win. I know Akron's undefeated, but if our kids come to play, they can win."

Old school

As for as the antiquated and oftentimes chaotic wingback formation that Akron uses in its offense, Svoboda believes the Tigers have an ace up their sleeves with assistant coach Bob Harris.

"He's an old-timer, he's seen it and he knows how to defend it," Svoboda said. "If there's anybody out there that can come up with a D against a single-wing, it's Bob."

Harris has no trouble going back to lessons learned from another semifinal wingback showdown. In 1992, Harris was an assistant coach at Steamboat Springs and Justin Armour was the talented wingback running in Manitou Springs' offense. Manitou Springs went on from a tight 13-7 semifinal win against Steamboat to win a state title. Armour went on to play for Stanford University and, eventually, the Denver Broncos.

But in that 1992 seminfinal, Harris found a way to hold Armour to less than 100 yards.

"It's nothing new - I've played against it and I've coached against it," Harris said of the wingback offense. "They bring a lot of blockers to the point of attack, and you just do all you can do to be there."

The wingback resembles a shotgun formation, with a quarterback and a running back lined up next to one another in the backfield. But with Akron's style of never using a balanced offensive line and a quarterback considered a "spinner" - someone equally capable of rushing or becoming a fullback-like lead blocker - it's anyone's guess who will get the snap and which way the Rams decide to move off the line.

"It is a challenge," Harris said. "But we've got to lay it on the line and force them to do something they're not as good at. If we don't stop the run, it's going to be a long afternoon."

Harris could go through a long checklist of game components that will require flawless execution on behalf of the Tigers, but he finds comfort in their solid week of practice and knowing that they "haven't been intimidated yet this year."

Senior Aaron Haskins saw an edge for the Tigers when considering which team has more to lose.

"They're the No. 1 team in the state, but us, we've already reached our goal," Haskins said. "Making the third round, it was because we wanted it bad enough. If we want it bad enough, we could host state here if we leave it all on the field."

But Haskins and the other seniors have not forgotten the level of intensity required when facing an undefeated, top-ranked opponent from the Eastern Plains - one year ago they hosted, and lost to, the No. 1 Limon Badgers.

"Against Limon, with the sidelines packed, it felt like we were letting ourselves and the whole town down," Haskins said, proving that when the field transforms again this afternoon, the senior core will remember that feeling - that they're part of something that brings entire communities together.