Varsity Kansas - The Blog

by joanna

Here’s another installment of summer football. I talked with Hutchinson coach Randy Dreiling, Wichita Trinity coach Mike Kriwiel and West coach Heath Henderson.

Dreiling is one of my all-time favorite coaches. He has no problem completely ripping me when he disagrees with me, but I am so happy that he actually acts like he likes me sometimes. Because if he didn’t like me, I’d be scared. Yet I feel no need to suck up to him. Today he was hanging out by the pool, just chillin’ (my word, not his). Here’s what he had to say.

“We’re going to Pitt State on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday (for team camp. We’ll take between 50 and 60 kids…. We have young kids step up. Last year Tyler Fee (a sophomore then) was No. 4 on our depth chart (at linebacker), but after Pitt State, he was No. 1 and he never lost it…. (Team camp) gives you a chance to, well, it’s a long time since last season. They’ve lifted and grown. But it’s a short time between now and the start of the season. It’s probably pretty rare for a kid that’s not competing well at Pitt State to start for us. That’s not to say that they won’t start for us at the end of the season, but it’s a really good barometer to kind of judge where you are individually on our depth chart.

There will be some moving and shuffling. On our offensive line, we have one starter back. We have eight guys trying to get a starting position. By the end of Pitt State, we’ll have a pretty good idea. If we didn’t go, we’d spend the first week and a half trying to figure it out. The first full week we’d try to find a tight end. But now we’ll go into the preseason in August pretty much knowing who our starters are. It’s a huge advantage.”

On adding Rockhurt to Week 1 on the schedule. Missouri has gone to taking two teams out of each district to the playoffs, so they added a game to the regular season, starting a week earlier. Dreiling wanted to play Rockhurst the same week for both, but with the schedule change, it will be Rockhurst’s second game. He’s not pleased about it.

“It was going to be a tough game anyway. Trust me, I’m not making excuses.”

Onto Wichita Trinity which has had club football for the past five years and is starting football this year. Here’s coach Mike Kriwiel:

Trinity is doing summer weight lifting and will have its team camp the week of July 21st.

“We had about 30 out for club last year and I think we’ll have about 45 this year. … I would say we have stepped it up a little bit. I think the whole school is more excited about football being a part of the school, just the mere fact that we have more kids coming out. I think it’s felt throughout the building.”

And onto West High and new coach Heath Henderson, whose team is having team camp this week:

“We’re working on offensive and defensive systems, getting kids acclimated to the way we’re running practices, so come fall, it will be seamless…. We’ve had as many as 65 come. That’s a really good turnout for us in the summer. I was talking to a friend of mine at Northwest and they had 50 the first day, so I felt good about that. Last summer we had about 30.

Our numbers have been down, but I think the potential is there. One of the things I’ve done differently is I’ve created a call list for kids and each coach is responsible for making contacts. Each kid should hear from three coaches. We’re basically recruiting our own kids…. So there’s no excuses that you didn’t know what was going on. There’s a constant line of communication all through the summer. I hope we won’t lose kids in the summer and come into the fall ready. I know there are certain places that don’t have to do that, we do. I’m OK with that. We’re the ones who have to adjust to our kids until we have success…. I’ve heard, we can’t get them here, we can’t get them here. I don’t believe that. We’ll have to do things different. (He said he’s picked up at least a half-dozen kids to bring them to camp). We have kids who ride the city bus and get there at 6:30 to get there on time (camp runs 7-9).

We have a lot of kids in summer school and extended school year right now, so we have 8-12 kids who are doing one of those two things and have to be there anyway. We just encourage parents to get them here a little early.”

So there you go, three more teams to read about. Want to know anything else? Want to add something about these teams or another team? We’re always here!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 3:12 p.m. and is filed under Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.