BLOG: A Football Observation

When playing football at the high school level, our practices comprised mainly of scrimmages with the idea that players would learn in live action; a trial by fire. The intricacies and the finer points about the game were never taught to us. It didn’t matter how your form or technique was as long as you got your job done. For the most part it was just brute force against brute force, very few players had refined or polished games, very few players knew how to properly take on a block, to fill a hole and safely make a tackle. Too many at the high school level are raw, and seems that the more refined of the group are the ones that end up making the jump to the CIS level.

I always looked at shedding blocks as being one of my weak points, my coaches never really tried to work on it and neither did I; It was just something that I thought I’d never be able to do. Coming into the first few practices of my first OVFL season, I thought I was complete as a player. Boy was I wrong. From the very first day, the coaches preached proper technique when doing anything. Using this coaching, I learned how to properly overcome blockers in a span of what has been just a month. My tackling form which I always thought to be great has been broken down and is seeing steady improvement. My footwork, which has never been one of my strong points, has also been coming along. I have improved so much as a player in just a month’s worth of practice at this level, all through individual drills; our team has only scrimmaged twice. I used to be a huge fan of the idea of scrimmages as being the only way to improve as a player; how wrong was I. The level of play here is much higher than that at the high school level; the best players from the best high schools are trying out.
The high school I attended had about 1000 students, with anywhere from 7-10 high schools in the immediate area with a similar student body. The Cumberland Panthers draw from about an area of 350,000 people, so the level of competition is much higher here than at anything I’ve ever seen or been a part of before. At this point we’ve only been practicing once a week and the level of intensity is already through the roof; one can only imagine how it’ll be when we move towards our regular practice schedules of three times a week. Whatever challenges we may face this year, with the level of coaching we’ve received up to this point, I’m confident in our team’s ability to rise up and meet that challenge head on. Once again I leave you with a quote from another football movie “Remember The Titans”

“I’m a winner. I’m going to win”- Denzel Washington as Coach Herman Boone

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