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.

Building a Tradition - Summer Camp, Day 1

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

In Ohio, we are allowed to coach our kids in the summer months (June 1- July 31) for 10 days. How you use those days is really up to the individual coach/program. Some teams like to participate in a lot of 7-on-7 tournaments and events; others prefer to use theirs as practice days. Personally, I think they are best served as practice days, with a few 7-on-7’s mixed in, too.

I like the idea of backing the camp days up as close to the start of two-a-days as possible. This essentially gets us 2 additional weeks of two-a-day-like practices to teach our kids the offensive/defensive systems and philosophies. We will use two of our days to essentially do nothing but 7-on-7’s as we will be going to Lima Central Catholic High School one day, and we will compete in the Bucyrus Redmen 7-on-7 and Lineman Challenge another. We will do a third 7-on-7 in the evening one other day as well, and camp in the morning. 

With all the background of Ohio and its rules, and our schedule, lets get into Day 1 of camp. We came out ready to learn and were excited. I couldn’t ask for better enthusiasm to begin practice from our kids. It was hot with the temperature topping out in the mid-90’s as we began practice. The enthusiasm displayed by both our players and coaching staff was as high as you would like to see during the first 45 minutes of defensive practice. We then hit a little bit of a lull where our focus went out the window and we weren’t putting forth the effort we would like to see. The good news is that it was only Day 1. At the mid-practice break, I challenged our guys to come out for offensive practice ready to learn and put a complete practice together. 

After the break we started off slow as coaches, just going through our formation and adjustments, and how we align. It was a good session for our kids just to sit back and learn. 

I saw some really great signs offensively. Our timing on our snap count and motions needs a lot of work still, but to be honest, I have seen much worse first days in this offense, which is promising. Our guys need to understand that there is a solid foundation that is being built, but we are nowhere near where we need to be yet. I am very confident we will be better as we continue to get more practices under our belt and grasp why we are doing the things we are. 

Needless to say, I am excited to get out there today for Day 2 and watch as our football team develops and starts to experience more success on the practice field.