If you were to look through each and every U.P. high school football schedule, you’d find the Marquette Redmen saddled with one of the toughest of them all.

They’ll play their usual four game slate in the always tough Great Northern Conference. Their non-conference schedule is just as challenging with games against Negaunee, Traverse City Central, Sault Ste. Marie and Constantine.

With only eight regular season games on the docket, Marquette has little room for error if they want to make it back to the postseason for a fifth consecutive year.

“Traverse City (Central) is our opening opponent. They’re going to be very good. They started a lot of juniors last year and we were fortunate enough to beat them. Now, we have to travel to play them in game one. It’s a great opportunity, a great stadium to play in, and we’re all excited about our first game,” said head coach Dave L’Huillier.

“We had a great off–season workout session. We had a lot of guys that were here all summer that put in the time in and it’s paying off right now. We always have high expectations. We want to do better than just make the playoffs. We want to start winning some playoff games and take it as far as we can,” L’Huillier added.

“There’s a lot of good teams. There’s no easy weeks on our schedule,” said Marquette senior wide receiver Connor Brazeau. “We just have to play hard and give it our all every game. We want to be the best football players we can be out on the field, that’s what we work for. We just have to push ourselves everyday and work harder than the previous day and make ourselves better.”

The Redmen begin the season on the road at Traverse City Central Friday, August 29th.