I was “side-swiped” during the holidays. I decided to contact the coaches of the schools that we scrimmaged last year just to confirm that we would be getting together again. To my surprise, both of them said they would not be able to scrimmage us next August!
Soooooooooooo… I started the process of contacting other schools to see who might be interested. It’s not as easy as it appears! I have to find 2 schools who open the season the same week that we do. If not, they might be playing their opening game when we want our second scrimmage. From the front end of that, they may want to scrimmage a week before we are ready to scrimmage. So, timing is everything.
The other factor (and I’ve been asked this more than once) is: how challenging do you want your scrimmages to be? I have never been a proponent of playing top notch programs in scrimmages. We don’t need our kids beat up or even possibly injured before we even play our first game! The other factor is confidence level. You get your brains beat out in a scrimmage, it could adversely affect the psyche of your players.
I have confirmed both of our scrimmages today. We are “stepping up” in level of difficulty for next year. We will be scrimmaging a public school that is bigger than us in the first scrimmage and taking on a state power (from a lower division than we play in) in the second scrimmage. That sounds like I just contradicted myself from the last paragraph, doesn’t it?! Welllllllllllll…. we are in a little different situation this coming season. If everyone returns, we will have 10 starters back on Offense and 9 on Defense. We made it to the state championship game this past fall, so we should be pretty good again. This group needs to be challenged. I want us to go against stronger competition in our scrimmages this year so we can start getting prepared for a run to the championship again. Our kids need to be challenged. Your situation might be different— our was 2 years ago. I feel like we are at the point where weaker competition in scrimmages does not help us. We’ll see in August!
