Coaches have many things desired to be accomplished in first week of practice
As high school football practice for the 2025 season gets underway on Monday, the local coaches have a lot of things they would like to see their players get done during the first week, which will see players go in helmets and shorts on Monday through Thursday before going to full pads on Friday.
“We’ll go back and try to re-fresh everything,” Sallisaw coach Brandon Tyler said. “We’ll get our basic installs in on what we’re going to run. We’ll run about four or five run plays and pass plays. We’ll just build off that throughout the week. It’s year No. 3 (of Tyler’s tenure). Our kids know our philosophy and our system. Now, it’s just re-freshing everything. Then, we’ll try to play a little bit faster.”
“Your first four days of practice in fall camp is always about alignment and basic formations, and accomplishing the schemes we’re trying to accomplish,” Muldrow coach Logan Coatney said. “Outside of that, it’s allowing our kids to get into a rhythm of the mental focus it takes to go through a two-hour to 2.5-hour practice and soak in the information that’s needed. Obviously, it’s been quite a while since we had our spring camp, practices and 7-on-7s. Our kids need to come back out and kind of re-learn and re-focus on what their calls are and what we’re doing. The great thing for us is we have a lot of older kids who have been in the system, and they understand what they’re doing. I’m really excited to get to fall camp, and see the kids get out there and get their legs back under them. Once Friday gets here, we’ll get into it full tilt. We won’t change a lot of what we do. We’ll still go through our practices about the same way. We’ll start off and teach forms in tackling once again. We’ll have some things we’ll go through in general.”
“I look for a mentality, toughness and perseverance,” Roland coach Greg Wise said. “I look for all those intangibles that athletes have. I want to see athletes when they’re rear ends are pushed to the limit, how do they respond. Some kids inevitably haven’t been with us this summer — they’ve had to work or they’ve had other things going on. I want to see how they’re going to react to the kids we’ve had here. Are they going to buy into our culture that we’ve had going this summer. My main focus is our mental clarity, mental focus. perseverance and toughness going to be there. That’s what I’m looking for right now. I think we’ll have it just because of that core group we’ve had this summer.”
“Whenever you start out, it’s kind of like you’re starting over from spring and reiterating the things you put in during spring,” Central coach Jeremy Thompson said. “It’s a lot of your base alignment on defense — your base coverage. Offensively, it’s your base formations. There’s a lot of things that you’re reiterating things that the kids think they already know. On both sides of the ball, you’re working on things you’re wanting to do, like alignment. The things you did in the spring, you just go over them again — the base stuff you’re trying to do on both sides of the ball. After Week 1 (of practice), you start prepping for Week 2 and the rest of the season. You have to know going into Week 1 (of the regular season), that what you want to have in (place), you need to have in by the end of Week 1 (of practice). We’re ready to get started.”
“There’s going to be some new faces along the line mainly,” Vian coach Gary Willis said. “We’re going to try to get into that rhythm. The quicker you get into the rhythm offensively, the faster we can get guys into the right positions and get our timing down. That’s the main thing. We’re going to need to get conditioned. Even though we’ve been working out, it’s different than football (practice) — getting the pads on (for Friday’s practice) in the heat.”
“We’re just going to do the basics,” Gore coach Brandon Ellis said. “It’s basically going to be a big refresher course for the first two weeks. We’re not going to throw anything at them that they can’t handle as far as teaching wise. We don’t want to go fast because we don’t want to move on to anything that they don’t understand. It’s really going to be elementary. We don’t want to bombard them with a lot of new stuff all at once. My guys learn better bits and pieces at a time. It’s going to be learning at a slower pace. We’ll take this time to get into shape and get acclimated to the weather.”
“We hope we get acclimated to the heat,” Gans coach Gary Hixon said. “At the end of this week, it’s supposed to be 100 degrees. I know most of our kids went through (heat) during Summer Pride, we worked out in 100-degree weather. School will start on Thursday, so we’re going to go (with practice) in the afternoons. We’re going to go lift as if it’s a school day (on Monday), and we’ll practice like we normally would (during school time). We’re going to go over things we learned from team camp (and Summer Pride workouts) from the offensive and defensive perspectives. We’ll go over the things we need to. We’ll do a lot of drill work.”
“We’re going to see who we got,” Webbers Falls coach Trent Holt said. “We’re going to try to see what offense and defense we’re going to try to run. If we don’t (find something), we’re going to have to try something else. We went to team camp. We put in a defense we always run, but I don’t think we have the linebackers to do it. On Day 2 (of team camp), we switched defenses into a defense in which we’ll probably end up being in. We’re still iffy on our running backs.”
