MUSKEGON – Someday the West Michigan Ironmen are going to be in a super close game, where a single point could determine the outcome.

Who knows, that could even happen on Saturday night when the Ironmen host the Coralville Chaos in the American Indoor Football league championship game.

That single point could come in the form of a PAT (point after touchdown) kick, and if that’s the case, the Ironmen have a much better chance now than they’ve had for a few years.

Alex Carder, the team’s longtime star quarterback, is also the PAT kicker. While Carder has long been known for throwing tons of touchdown passes, his kicking was sometimes a bit of an adventure.

Before this season, there was nothing automatic about it when Carder lined up to make the short, seemingly easy kicks.

In a game last season against the Ohio Boom, missed two extra points. The same thing happened in a game against the Toledo Shamrocks.

Carder shared the PAT role at times with another kicker last season, and records are not completely clear on who did the kicking in each game. But the Ironmen missed at least one extra point in all but one game and a total of eight on the season.

By the end of the year, they were mostly going for two-point conversions after touchdowns.

The good news is that Carder has significantly improved his success rate this season.

He was 9-for-10 in the season opener against Coralville, 7-for-8 against the Cedar Rapids River Kings, 9-for-9 against the Detroit Ravens and 6-for-6 against the Michigan Avengerz.

None of those extra points have been crucial in the final score. The Ironmen are 6-0 and most of the games have been blowout victories, but again, the day could come when a single point or two might matter.

“When I had a game where I was 100 percent, that was my proudest moment,” Carder said with a chuckle, when asked about his improvement.

Some fans have probably assumed that Carder practiced a lot in the offseason, but that really wasn’t the case.

He said it’s mostly been a matter of relaxing more before making the kicks. He said he’s also given kicking some thought when pursuing his favorite free-time sports, golf and soccer.

“I know it sounds silly, but swinging a golf club kind of helps me get in the same kind of mindset for swinging my foot,” said Carder, who has been the Ironmen quarterback for all but one season since the team was launched in 2016. “When I played with the Portland Thunder back in 2013, the kicker talked about the same type of thing – in golf you can’t flex your club, it’s pretty fixed, and kicking a football has that in common. I’ve just been kind of reapplying that principle.

“Like any sport, you have to have a short memory with mistakes. You learn and move on.”

Another championship opportunity for Carder

The 2024 season had a painful ending for the Ironmen, who lost to the Michigan Avengerz 32-12 in the Great Lakes Arena Football league championship game.

Carder was suffering from a lingering injury and only played a few series at quarterback before coming out of the game.

The freak injury occurred in the previous game, when Carder was jumping over the boards to get on the field. A piece of padding on the boards came loose as he jumped, he got caught up on it, fell and injured the labrum in his right throwing arm.

He got through that game on adrenaline, but afterward could not lift his arm.

The pain was still there when the championship game rolled around, so he tried to pass left-handed, and that didn’t work out so well.

“I tried to go,” Carder said. “It was not like I had to throw it that far. But once we got into the game situation, (the left arm) wasn’t strong enough to rely on. I played two series and had a couple of incompletions. They were not awful throws, but they weren’t complete and we ended up turning the ball over on downs. That was the end of that.”

He was replaced at quarterback by several teammates over the course of the game, but none of them were able to get the Ironmen offense moving.

Meanwhile, Carder was forced to sit on the bench and watch his team lose the game and the championship opportunity.

“It was not a fun feeling at all,” he said.

That painful experience is one reason why Carder is extra excited about Saturday’s championship game against Coralville, a team the Ironmen beat pretty handily twice this season.

He knows it might be a different sort of game this time, because Coralville has apparently added some players from Cedar Rapids, a neighboring team in Iowa, and will likely have a more talented lineup on Saturday.

Carder is not bothered by that.

“We want the best possible competition, regardless of how that comes about,” he said. “It’s really outside of our control. We can only control what we do on the field, and we feel pretty confident about that.”

There’s a reason for Carder’s confidence. The Ironmen, with a lot of new players this year, have been even more dominant that usual on both sides of the ball, outscoring opponents by a combined total of 321-97. The veteran quarterback has led the way with 18 touchdown passes in four home games, and several more in the one road game he played in.

Some say this may be the best Ironmen team to ever take the field, and Carder thinks that’s a legitimate argument.

“It’s hard to argue against that, not only from a talent perspective, but because of the team camaraderie and the buy-in with this group,” he said. “These are a bunch of guys who are just appreciating the opportunity to still play. That’s more prevalent than in years past. We used to have some guys who wanted to move up, and sometimes started to expect too much. This year, everybody just wants to play at the highest level they possibly can.”

Considering that, the veteran quarterback is fully expecting his team to claim its fifth league championship trophy on Saturday night.

“I am definitely excited about this game,” Carder said. “Like any game, we will have to go out and execute, but it means the world to us. It’s our Super Bowl!”