Varsity Kansas - The Blog

by joanna

Checked in with Heights football coach Rick Wheeler this afternoon. He didn’t call me back on Monday, but I forgave him. It was a busy week with the Falcons down in Tulsa for a team camp.

Here’s what he had to say:

“There’s two or three things that we try to get out and the kids try to get out (of the team camp.) For the first thing, you get to play football in June, that doesn’t happen every day. For a player, they get a chance to compete and earn a position and they’re being evaluated all the time. It’s the first time we’re together as the football team of 2008. Our seniors aren’t with us anymore.

From a coach’s point of view, it’s evaluation and them a chance to develop leadership. And then we have to limit the number of things we can do with them. They have to figure out a lot of stuff on their own. All the focus is on football. We’re not at home, they’re not worried about their job or their girlfriend, they just worry about football. It’s kind of a kickoff to our season.

We have our team camp (at Heights) the last week of July, I think just for the carry over.  It gives them the best chance for carry over. We’ve done it different ways. We’ve done it where we had (a Heights) team camp and didn’t go to a team camp. We had Heights camp the first week out of school and then team camp the next week. There are real positives to that, where you are a lot more ready for camp when you do that. But then it’s a long time until aug. 18. I think with our kids, too, we get better turnout with freshman when we go later in the summer. Their familes are more in tune with let’s start thinking about football. When we do it the very first week of June, their heads are still spinning from finishing up middle school.

It gives us an opportunity. Everyone can’t go to a contact camp. By our state rules, for our coaches to be clinicians, we can’t make up more than 10 percent of the camp. So by rule, to go to a camp, if a kansas school is there, there has to be 10 schools. In Oklahoma, they don’t have that rule, so (Oklahoma schools) will show up with 70, 80, 90, every single player they have. That’s the way we’d love to do it. (Heights took 44 players)

Most of the Oklahoma schools and Arkansas schools just got done with 16 days of spring ball. We don’t have spring ball, and I’m not necessarily an advocate of spring ball. But it gives them an opportunity to develop skills and compete against kids that do have those opportunities.

I’m speaking across the board for all of our coaches and sports (at Heights) that we have a mission to make sure we give those kids — everything they give to us and compete for heights — to make sure we do right by them and try to allow them to have every opportunity to have that same level of success at the next level. We go to (Tulsa’s team camp) so kids can measure themselves against kids in other states that have different rules.”

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 3:18 p.m. and is filed under City League, Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.