It’s been a tough season for the Peabody football team in 2007. The Tanners are 1-9 entering their Thanksgiving Eve matchup with Malden Catholic. The Lancers come into the game with a 3-7 mark that includes a victory over Xaverian.MC, first-year Peabody coach Dick Woodbury said, is “definitely going to be a challenge.” He said that the Lancers have “some speed” and are a “good team,” adding, “We’re expecting them to come at us hard. We know that. We have to be prepared to take on that challenge, and we will be.”Peabody has faced plenty of challenges this season, including numerous injuries. “We’ve been decimated by injuries pretty much all year,” Woodbury said. “We can’t use that as an excuse. You have to go with what you’ve got. Injuries gave young kids a chance to play, a baptism under fire. That’ll bode well for us for next year.”One more game, and Woodbury will have completed his inaugural season as a head coach.”It’s been very gratifying in a lot of ways,” he said. “There haven’t been troubles, haven’t been problems. The kids haven’t quit on themselves.”A 13-6 win over Danvers gave the Tanners their first victory of the season. Woodbury likes what he’s seen from his team lately.”We’ve playing much better,” he said. “We could have won three or four other games. We went into the last minute. We’re a very young team. We made some young-team mistakes, oftentimes at very inopportune times. But there’s a huge learning curve. Lots of kids are coming back next year. The future’s very bright.”Against the Lancers, the coach wants his secondary to step up.”We let up three big plays against Lynn English that cost us that ballgame,” he noted. On offense, he plans to distribute the ball on Wednesday, and will look to Scott Diefenbach, the only senior in the backfield, to get a sizable amount of carries. The coach also said that the backfield includes “a couple sophomores and a junior. It’ll be pretty evenly distributed.”Running the ball with a young team presented its difficulties this season. “To a certain degree, yes, we established the running game, but we’re young,” Woodbury said, adding that the line is often “mismatched against kids who were older and bigger.”We were able to run the ball, but we didn’t get the depth of penetration from the line that we liked. The techniques were there; we’ve just got to get the kids bigger. That’s one of our goals in the off-season, to get kids bigger. We have 20 starters returning on offense and defense.”Among the returning players Woodbury mentioned are Kevin Bettencourt, who is averaging about 20 tackles per game and “pretty much led the team on defense all year,” the coach said; quarterback Tommy Ciulla; and running back Nick Hiou.”I expect big games, big years out of them, and we’ve got basically our whole offense and defensive line coming back,” Woodbury said. “We’ve got three starters on offense that are seniors, and three on defense. The rest are sophomores and juniors. We’ve pretty much got the entire team back next year. Those kinds of things take some time. We paid the price for being young.”