South Liberty County Area coaches discuss first week of practice

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Area coaches discuss what they’re looking for during first week of practice

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By MIKE GEORGE

Published: 08.11.08

A swing through South Liberty County and West Chambers County brought reports from the five area teams about what each head coach was looking for going into fall practices.

JERRY STEWART – DAYTON (19-4A)

“Nothing is set in stone at Dayton. Every position is open to competition. Nothing has to do with anything else; our practices will proceed just like they were going to. People don’t want to hear excuses – people don’t want to hear about that stuff. They want to hear about what you’re going to do. In the end they’re not going to know or care who’s on the team and who’s not. They just want to know if the team can succeed, so we’re not going to make any excuses about winning or losing, or anything. If you lose a game, you lose a game and if you win a game, you win it. So we won’t spend any time on that – we’re going to go out and our kids will be ready to play. Now, it might take a game or two. Our pre-district and scrimmages are going to have to be used to get some experience right now – that’s the biggest change. We’re not going to be able to focus as much on some other stuff, but we’ll be fine – Dayton will be fine.â€

DON PRICE – BARBERS HILL (19-4A)

“We’ll be looking to find players that can play. Then we’ll try to get them to learn our system and plays on both sides of the ball, offense and defense while we’re in shorts and t-shirts and be ready to go when we get to that first day in pads. We’re still looking for starters. We’re okay at quarterback with Tony Carmona coming back and we’ve got our basic receivers and a few offensive linemen back (Matt Peterson, 6-3, 265, 5.5) but we’re looking for a running back (loss of Andrew Little). Defensively, we’re looking for outside linebackers and secondary players so it’s going to be a time of evaluating players and see who can play on Friday nights.

Last year we didn’t have but about three starters back on either side of the ball, so we had to take some JV kids and sophomore kids and find some Friday night players, so we’re a little better. We’ve got about six players on offense and five on defense. I mean we’ve still got to hunt for some people but we’ve got some kids who have played on Friday night and that makes a difference.

As far as running back it’s all suspects and no prospects. We’re going to be looking at anybody and everybody – the position is wide open and no front runner and we really won’t know anything until we get into our full scrimmage format.â€

SHANE DEEL – LIBERTY (22-3A)

“I can’t wait. All the work is done, the field house is finished, we’ve gotten all our coaches hired, the kids have been coming in and out every day, and it’s time to go do the fun part of it. We basically have the 50 on defense, and I feel like we’ve got some kids that are going to go over there and help us out and hopefully make an improvement on that side of the ball to start with.

At linebackers we’re looking at James Freeman, another junior, a very quick kid, and we’re going to have an all-out battle for the other linebacker spot. We’ve got several I think can get it done.

In the secondary, we’ve got Andy Beene coming back who played corner last year. He had four interceptions and I never saw him make a bad play. We’ve also got Tevin Goodman coming back, who saw action both ways last year, so we’ve got a good chance to be really good at the corners. With Ryan Hebert we’ve got three guys coming back, but we’ll have open competition for that one safety spot, but the three give us a good foundation to build off of and some flexibility in what we can do back there, like rolling our coverage to help out the fourth position. So, I’m really excited about what’s happening on the defense right now in overall speed.

John “Bubba Zalesak is coming back at quarterback and he’s as smart a kid as I’ve been around when it comes to football. He’s very savvy about the game, takes control of the huddle and he’s literally a coach on the field and we’re going to do some things to help him get opened up. We’re a power football team, so we’re going to find the best five blockers we can get and let them go to work. We work out of the multiple-I set. We base out of a two-back system, but it’s flexible. Our thing is we have to go establish a new line of scrimmage. We don’t want our OL to learn a whole bunch of different plays so our skill kids will do all the adjusting. We are a keep it simple type football team. We’re not tricky, we’ll just come after you as fast as we can run.

LARRY HAYNES – HARDIN (23-2A)

“At quarterback we’re looking at Jeremy Dickey (Jr) who came in from New Caney, a transfer, his dad is our defensive coordinator. John Stelly is returning at running back and he rushed for over 1,000 yards last year (1,109) and was all-district both ways at running back and linebacker. The three returning starting seniors that we have are Garrett Perry, Wade Williams (OL) and John Stelly, and all three will play a big role in our success and the type of leadership they give us will have a lot to do with how we do this year.

Wade Williams is a 2nd team returning all-district OL and Garrett Perry also started on the OL for us last year.

WR Hunter Davis (6-2, 4.6) is our top returning leading receiver who finished sixth in the state last year. He had better than 43 catches for 809 yards and 11 TD’s.

We haven’t seen QB Dickey in pads yet, but 7-on-7 went pretty well, but John Stelly will run the ball along with Mitch Villemez who played a little bit at RB last year and started for us on defense. He’ll start of at free safety for us this year and play running back. Then, Marquis James (So.), who started on defense last year, will move to TE for us, but he’ll also play some at DE.

As far as offense, how much we run it and throw it will depend on sometimes our opponent and at other times with how well we’re doing what we try to do, so that’s not been determined yet, either.

Anchoring the defensive line is Dylan Barber – he’s the only returning DL we have and he’s only a junior, starting last year as a sophomore. The rest of the spots are pretty much wide open, and that goes for offense as well. We lost quite a few kids on both sides of the ball with 5 kids back on each side of the ball.â€

JOE ALLEN SLACK – HULL-DAISETTA (23-1A)

“We lost Adrian Robinson, Franklin Smith and Anthony Walker, but with Sam Elliott back at QB and Aaron Cook, we should be able to move the ball. Then, with 9 of our defensive starters coming back we should be able to stop somebody, at least I would hope so. We’ve already replaced the two defensive positions so our defense is pretty much set. Offensively, we have more question marks, but frankly, our defense should help make our offense better because that’s who they’ll be practicing against.â€

[KFDM COOP]

Good stuff Mike

[Mike George]

Thanks, I don't get on here much because of my schedule, but don't read this here - follow the link to see some Liberty Panther practice photos. I really didn't get around that much to practices, but aim to have quite a bit of photos of this week's scrimmages: Liberty-Hardin, Hull-Daisetta, Dayton, and Barbers Hill. To see what can be done follow this link and wait for the photos to start revolving. Sorry if your internet speed is slow but it will eventually speed up as they go through.

Anyway, you can hit the pause button and view one at a time and go back and forth as you like.

This is what you can look forward to next week as you read about each of the scrimmages.

Here is the link to what I'm talking about:

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[Guest HHSGRAD]

Good report King George.