New Six Town Hollow Offense Has Been Unstoppable
Six Town Hollow High football has been an afterthought for years now. They have made the playoffs only once in the past 10 years, and it’s been 22 years since they last won a playoff game. The small 1A school plays second fiddle to other schools in The Valley like Valley City, Strong River Bend, and Valley Prep. We didn’t even include them in our Valley football preview, but I guess we should have. They have gotten off to a hot 5-0 start, their best since 2007.
Six Town Hollow is coached by Steve Dundee. Dundee is in his first year as a head coach at any level. Dundee is from Melbourne, Australia, and he came to the U.S. 7 years ago to punt at Central MS Tech (CMT). After graduating from CMT, he was a backup punter in the Canadian Football League for 2 years. Dundee married Mary Jane Jones, who hails from The Valley, and they moved back to Six Town Hollow a few years ago. Dundee got into teaching and coaching at Six Town Hollow last year as assistant coach, and he was promoted to head coach this year after their previous coach was let go.
Dundee said, “The administration offered me the job in May, and I had a weak moment and said yes. That night I started thinking that I’d lost my mind. I have no idea what I’m doing, and we just came off a 1-9 season. I started thinking that we had to do something unique and out of the box to gain an advantage on our opponents. I played Australian Rules Football (rugby) growing up, and I started thinking about ways to incorporate rugby into our offense. Well, ChatGPT and I started a dialogue, and I’d created the Aus Toss offense within 30 minutes. It’s crazy when you think about it.”
At first glance, the Aus Toss looks like other modern offenses. They’ll sometimes go empty with 5 wide; at other times, they’ll go 4 wide with one back. On occasion, they’ll even use two back sets. Things start to look differently after the ball is snapped. Dundee said, “We will have at least 2 pitch men on every play to lateral the ball to. Generally, we’ll have one on the left and one the right, but if the play is ran to the sideline, we’ll have two pitch men on either the left or right of the ball carrier depending on which sideline the play is ran toward. If our ball carrier or receiver is getting tackled or about to get tackled, they’re taught to pitch the ball to the nearest pitch man. It took me a while to teach rugby style pitches with spin, but the guys have it down now. Coaches have never seen anything like it before, so it’s been very difficult to stop.”
The Aus Toss even gets the linemen involved in the pitch game. On certain plays, offensive linemen are pitch men and get an opportunity to carry the ball. It’s interesting to see Six Town Hollow’s linemen doing pitch drills in practice; you definitely won’t see that anywhere else. Dundee added, “We’ve gotten a lot of buy-in from our offensive linemen. They love being able to carry the ball and get involved besides just blocking. We work really hard on our conditioning; you have to be in great shape to run this offense. So, we like to reward our big guys when we get a chance.”
Six Town Hollow has won every game this season by at least 21 points, and they wear opponents down in the second half of games. It will be interesting to see how defensive coordinators adjust to the Aus Toss going forward, but up to this point, they’ve had no answers. Some think the Aus Toss will eventually be mentioned among other iconic offenses such as the Wing T, Wishbone, Air Raid, and more. We’ve got a long way to go before that happens, but I bet you’ll see more coaches studying and copying the Aus Toss.
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