High school football practice kicks off today as scheduled after the Governor’s announcement on Friday. El Dorado’s varsity hopes to be on the high school practice field at approximately 10 a.m.
As is always the case, the first week of practice is a no-contact week with players wearing helmets for two days before putting on pads.
El Dorado coach Steven Jones said, even though they’ll be no blocking or tackling, he’s excited.
“We can do a lot. We’ll be able to use blocking dummies. Monday and Tuesday we’ll be in helmets and then Wednesday through Friday we’ll get in shoulder pads,” said Jones. “We’ll still have to maintain guidelines for social distancing in the weight room and in the meeting room, things like that. But as far as on the field practice goes, we’re wide open to practice, just not making any football contact.”
Watching his players compete could be the biggest thing this week. Expect the Wildcats to do a lot of ones vs. ones in pass skel, 7-on-7 type drills.
“For the past month, we’ve been able to do nothing but individual drills. If we did a team workout, such as conditioning, we had to keep our spacing. We can do team drills. We can do pass skel and all the things we normally do throughout the summer and the first week of practice,” said Jones.
“We’re excited to do that. We’re going to do some 7-on-7 for about an hour to start the day. That’s been taken away from us this summer and we didn’t get to see our offense and defense compete against each other. So, we’ll get into that right off the bat. We’ll spend a lot of time Monday through Thursday on 7-on-7.”
The offense can also line up and run plays for the first time and do other team drills. But having actual competition will be an early focus.
“I think the kids are excited to get out there, but the coaching staff is fired up,” Jones said. “It’s been monotonous these past several weeks. To get out there and compete Monday, everybody is so excited. Our offensive and defensive staffs have been jawing at each other the past week. It’ll be good to compete and we’re excited to get out there and see what actually happens.”
Jones emphasized the only football activity missing will be the blocking and tackling. But any contact is better than none. The blocking and tackling dummies should get quite the workout.
“We can’t tackle. We can’t hit one another. But we can definitely run around and do one-on-ones and things like that. We just can’t make football contact. You get to see the moving parts,” said Jones.
“I think the biggest difference is for the offensive and defensive linemen to be able to hit. We can’t hit another person but at least we can make contact with a dummy this week. We’re excited just to hit something.”