GAME DAY INFORMATION DATE: October 7, 2023 LOCATION: Ralph F. DellaCamera Stadium West Haven, Conn. GAME DAY LINKS LIVE STATS | LIVE VIDEO

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The first half of the 2023 season has been one full of challenges for the University of New Haven football team with four night games, three of the first five games coming on the road and injuries to key players adding to the degree of difficulty for the Chargers.

There could be a sense of normalcy coming to the program as the Chargers are set to play nothing but early afternoon starts beginning with Saturday's matchup with visiting Lincoln University.

"We concentrated on the first five weeks of what a crazy schedule it was," New Haven coach Chris Pincince said. "Thursday night, Friday night and two different Saturday night games at different times all over this region of the country. We are happy to be done with that part and the last five games are all Saturday afternoons at 1 o'clock and four of them, we get to play here. It is always good to play at home, travel-wise, time-wise, logistic-wise, I would rather play Saturday afternoon on the Blue."

For just the second time in the last eight seasons, the Chargers will have three consecutive home games. It would be an understatement to suggest that Saturday's opponent does things a little differently. The Oaklanders will play all 12 games on the road this season with eight of them requiring flights. This will be the sixth state that winless Lincoln will play in so far this season. Playing multiple Football Championship Subdivision teams has played a role in Lincoln being outscored 232-64 this season.

"From a talent level standpoint, they would be at the top of our league," Pincince said. "They are extremely good on defense, their running back [Otis Weah] is the best player we are going to see and their offensive line is absolutely massive."

While the Chargers have been breaking down film of Lincoln's games including last week's loss to Texas Southern and a matchup with Lamar, much of the focus has been on reversing the trend of slow starts and early turnover issues.

"We need to get off to a better start," Pincince said. "We have struggled with that for whatever reason. I don't know the reason. If I knew the reason, we would change it. I don't know if it is the bus trips, playing at night but we need to get off to a better start. We have to get ahead of this thing. We can't let them dictate field position and we have to stop them from handing the ball to the running back who is probably the best player we are going to see all year. He is fantastic. We have to try to stop him from carrying the football and if we can get ahead, that will help us do that."

Weah has two 100-yard rushing games and is also featured prominently in the passing game.

New Haven found itself with Week 6 and 8 bye weeks and rather than play just nine games during the regular season, the Chargers agreed to let the California-based Lincoln University team come to town.

"Lincoln University in California is the only team in America that had Week 6 or Week 8 as a bye week," Pincince said. "If we want to play 10 football games, we had to play these guys."

Along with a stronger start, Pincince wants to be able to field a healthy team. It won't happen on Saturday. Quarterback Daelen Menard (Fort Lauderdale, Fla./Chaminade Madonna) could be back after missing last week's win at American International College but it could still be a week before running backs Christopher Ais (Stoughton, Mass./Stoughton) or Jake Conlan (West Haven, Conn./Trinity-Pawling) return and center Matthew Prudhomme (Orlando, Fla./Bishop Moore Catholic) will also be sidelined this week.

The Chargers have found a way to win four games in a row despite missing starters on both sides of the ball.

"[Quarterback] Jack [Chandler] has been great in his role," Pincince said. "When you can have your third-team running back [Hunter Cobb (Sandy Hook, Conn./Newtown)] win player of the week in the conference and rush for 113 yards and your fourth-string running back [Zaon Laney (Hoboken, N.J./Rahway)] rushes for 99 yards, you look at the depth that we have at some of those spots. Defensively, in the outside linebacker spot there have been four different kids playing at one time or another. On the defensive line, we have never had an entire [healthy] defensive line during the course of a game. It says a lot about the depth and the number of players that we have but we have to get healthy at some point."

After back-to-back night games on the road, Pincince is happy to return to a routine of having a full week of practice to prepare to play.

"This is the first week that we have had a full week of practice because of travel, an early game, a late game, weather, we had heat issues, we had rain issues," Pincince said. This is the first week when we practiced all week.

"You see progress, you see guys finally getting a little more comfortable. We haven't had the whole first group of offense together the whole year from O-line to wide outs to running backs to tight ends. It would be nice if we could do that at some point before the end of this year."