Our first pre-season scrimmage is tonight. I don’t feel like we’re ready!!! Practices have been good but, with a (basically) new staff, we’ve been doing a LOT more teaching. The kids have responded but… it just shows how far behind we were to start with.
It’s been frustrating that the players (for the most part) simply do not see the importance of watching Hudl on their own time. We check the log in’s and very few of them are watching much video. I have substituted watching video as a team (which took up practice time) for the players watching it at home. We have taped a lot more of our practice sessions this summer. As OC, I then makes “notes”/corrections on the video as does our DC. We send it out to the players but…
One thing that has resonated with the team has been our emphasis on “The Fable of the Stone Cutter.” I believe I shared this story on an earlier post so check back in the blog history. We bought a small sledge hammer and presented it to the player who “hit the stone” the hardest and most consistently all week. We will do this on Monday’s from now till the end of the season. By the way, the player who won it for the first week was our Freshman running back… who ran Scout Team Offense all week and “pounded the rock” against our 1st D! He kept hitting that stone!
We’ll be pretty basic tonight with our O and D game plans. We want to see them aligned right and just “git after ’em!” I’m going to take a page from the NFL philosophy of limiting the amount of snaps that our starters will take in this, our 1st preseason game. We know what our returning starters can do. We want to evaluate the younger kids. We told them that we don’t “cut” nor “release” players like the NFL does… but, they will be able to show us either 1- they deserve more playing time or 2- it’ll show them why they’re a back up and what they need to improve upon to get more playing time.
Go Saints!!!
