ALBUQUERQUE - It's been a lot quieter on Tomlinson Field on the Menaul School campus this fall.

Football coach Jeff Strohecker could be seen holding a clipboard and talking to a dozen players one afternoon last week. He wasn't yelling, merely instructing his Panthers what they could expect in the season finale last Saturday against Valley Christian Academy.

"We have to finish the season strong," Strohecker said, knowing his team was taking a 2-6 overall record into the finale. The dozen Panthers listening weren't the offensive unit; it wasn't the defensive unit.

The 12 players are the team.

Strohecker, who moved to Rio Rancho recently with his girlfriend Carisa Steele, a 2000 graduate of Rio Rancho High School, is in his first season as the Panthers coach.

It's also the first year for 8-man football for the school, opened in the late 19th century and still located on the same spot of land, at Menaul Boulevard at Broadway in northeast Albuquerque.

It's also the first year for 8-man football in the state and, with numbers dropping recently, the school opted to go from 11-man football - in which it had once been a Class AA powerhouse, winning a state title in 1991 and getting to the championship game as recently as in 1999.

It wasn't the only change for the Panthers, whose coach, Joe Marquez, died last year.

Strohecker, 25, grew up in California playing football and then played the game at Kansas Wesleyan University, where he met Steele, an all-state soccer player at RRHS and a player at KWU, was tabbed the school's coach for '06.

"I stayed there one year as a student assistant, one year as a graduate assistant," he said. "Then I left to go to a high school just outside that city, in Salina, Kans., where I was lucky to be part of a staff and a team; we won the Kansas 3A state title last year.

"I learned a lot from them, from the kids and the coaches," he added.

As for the move here, aided by Steele's pregnancy and the fact that her parents live in Rio Rancho and have room for the young couple, he said, "I had sent out resumes all over the nation. ... This one opened up and when I came and interviewed for the job, it seemed like a good fit for me. Being a smaller school, I liked that setting a little better."

Strohecker teaches middle school health and physical education; he'll also be the school's track and field coach in the spring, maybe even have a position for his father-in-law-to-be, Jeff Steele, to be his thrower's coach.

Getting adjusted to 8-man football was easy.

"I don't think it's as difficult as most people think it's supposed to be," he said. "Eight-man is very similar to 11-man. You can run an 11-man style offense and you can do all the same things. ... Defensively, you can run 0-4 coverage, if you wanted to.

"There are a few adaptations to a smaller field," he added. "It's just narrower. If we go to a field at a small school - like we went to Mountainair - they still have an 80-yard field, and it's 40 yards wide. But you lose three people, too."

Although the Panthers went on to lose 57-6 to Valley Christian Academy (decent, considering the Panthers have come out on the short end of 80-0 and 96-6 games), giving the Panthers a six-game losing streak, he said the team has made progress.

"Now, do the scores from our games show it all the time? No, but I do think that, progressively as a team, we have gotten better.

"It's just that those kids last year didn't have a full season, they couldn't have full practices all the time - it's real hard to get better that way," he explained. "We've had practice every day, we've played every game, we're going to finish out the season, and we'll be OK."

Strohecker is OK, too, fully expecting to make the Panthers into a contender in 2007.

"The first game we lost was Clovis Christian (56-0); they just came out and hit us," he recalled. "We played Pine Hill (48-8 opening-game win) and Pine Hill, I would believe, has gotten better, but Clovis Christian was our first big test - and I thought we were going to play better than that.

"We didn't play Floyd because of lightning," he continued. "Up next was a 12-8 home victory over Reserve.

Then the losses began to mount, beginning with an 80-0 setback against Melrose, also at Tomlinson Field.

The Panthers run out of shotgun formation on every play. "We do some of the same things maybe Texas Tech or some of those spread offenses do," he said.

The Panthers have yet to achieve Texas Tech's success, but give them time, Strohecker asks.

Menaul School is "the one school that I felt comfortable with," he said. "(Being) comfortable with where you're at is the biggest thing," whether he's on the historic Menaul School campus or in the City of Vision.

He's not as comfy yet with the question asked throughout New Mexico, "Red or green?"

"I'm so California-boy still that it's got to be real mild green chile, and good luck with that, because there isn't anyone serving mild stuff around here," he said.