Building a Tradition - Summer Camp, Day 3

by Brian Wical
Cardinal Stritch High School Head Football Coach
Follow @CoachWical

After two days of camp last week, Cardinal Stritch took the field Monday morning for the third time. Monday was our best day yet, which is good. I told the team that at the end of each practice, I should be standing there telling them that today was the best day yet.

We started the day off doing a tackling drill to wake our guys up, since we were starting at 7:30 this morning. The drill was fantastic, in that it really helped serve its purpose. Our players really got into it. It is always great as a coach seeing your kids enthusiastic and excited to be out there practicing as team. 

Defensively, our players started demonstrating knowledge of our scheme on Monday. Not just knowledge but mastery of the front. My defensive coordinator, Gary Allen, refused to move forward in the teaching process until our guys understood our base alignment, mixed with all of the defensive coverage’s that we will run. After Monday’s practice, I know he feel confident moving on to the next phase in the installation plan. 

We held a kicking tryout yesterday during or mid-practice break. We literally had no kicker on the roster left over from last season, and being new to the school, I didn’t really know capabilities of our kids in terms of kicking. I had all of the players kick XPs and also kickoff. We have narrowed our search down from the entire team to about six guys. Today we will try to narrow that down to two kids that we will really work with on our FG/XP teams.

 

Offensively, we also put together a complete practice. This is a great thing because on Friday, I thought we lost our focus for the last 30 minutes of the offense. We struggled completing our pass routes against air, even. Monday, the kids really came out ready to improve though, and it showed. We are grasping the offensive plays, formations, and overall philosophy much better than I thought we would, to be honest. I thought it would take us longer to grasp our offense than it would our defense. So far, it has proven to be the opposite.

 

Today, we come back with another camp day in the morning. We are then going to go against Toledo Waite and Toledo Scott at night in a 7-on-7. It will be good for us for a few reasons. First, we can run our routes against other athletes that don’t know the plays ahead of time. Also, we will see if we can cover anybody on defense. These two schools are well over twice our enrollment. I am anxious to see how we compete.

 

I will update later today after the 7-on-7.