​LAMAR, MO. — After a winning 8-4 season in 2025, the Lamar Tigers are back with 60 players on the roster, including 14 seniors and several returners, hoping to use that experience and veteran leadership to their advantage this season.Head coach Jared Beshore said, “We want to have a great leadership, sphere of influence on our team. The more leaders you have on the team, the more accountable the team is, the more focused the team is and a more player led a team is, so to me I think that translates into wins and losses.”One of those leaders is senior running back Terren Williams who will take on a bigger role this season.Williams said, “You got to play every game and every play as hard as you can. That’s what I want to show the young guys and have them when they become seniors plays the same way I played.”Beshore said, “We want to run the ball. We said we have to establish the physicality, we have to know what we’re doing, we have to know our assignment, we have to execute it.”After winning the Class 3 State Championship in 2024, Lamar is looking to put itself back in position to play for another title, and to get there, the team is getting their mindset right first.”We got to be accountable. We got to listen to our coaches they knew, they’ve been there multiple times, and they know how to get there and we just got to be accountable and teachable,” Williams said.”We’re just trying to build to our end goal, day by day, get get better each day, win today, just kind of our our our motto here, so we just got to take one step better each day,” Beshore said.Lamar football is set to start the season on the road on Friday, August 28 against Aurora.Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KSNF/KODE | FourStatesHomepage.com.