Varsity Kansas - The Blog

by joanna

Continuing my look into area football teams, I spoke with Mulvane football coach Dave Fennewald. I’m actually coming to you a day late because I chatted with him right before I left the office yesterday. Sorry about that.

By the way, I love dealing with Coach Fennewald for a couple reasons — he always calls back so promptly and he’ll talk about anything, no matter how tough the topic is. I did warn him, though, that he and I will be talking quite a bit about Huldon Tharp and his recruiting.

He said that Tharp has been offered by Stanford, KU, Miami, Iowa State, Colorado, Boise State and another he couldn’t remember off the top of his head. Fennewald added that Tharp has made it clear he won’t commit until after the season and the’s “humbled by all these offers.” Tharp is definitely a special talent and an athlete to watch for.

All right, here’s what Fennewald said about his team this summer:

“We don’t do our team camp until the last week of July. It’s just kind of been, since I’ve been here, what I’ve done. The kids know when the last week of july comes, that’s when it will be, rather than bouncing around in different weeks of the summer each year.

“We just got  back from Pitt State (at team camp) last Friday. What I like about team camps is it allows your seniors to be leaders for the first time. They’ve never had to be in a leadership role. Now they are the leaders. The other thing I like, the seniors that you lose, you have to find pple to fill those spots. It allows you to look at kids, look at the things you’re doing offensively and defensively and experiment wtih some different plays and players. It allows you to maybe take a tackle and move him to center for a couple days. In a situation like that, it won’t hurt you. In August, you don’t have time to experiment. You don’t have time to look at kids like you want.

“We had 27 kids go to our team camp. We leave it open to the juniors and seniors coming back. If they want to go, any junior or seniro that wants to go, they can.
When they get back, they talk about it throughout the year. We limit the number of sophomores we usually take. We had to  cut down on sophomores, because if we take too many kids, you don’t get as much accomplished.

Wichita East went to Pitt State at the same time and I told Coach Byers that you wait until next year; you’ll have more kids that want to. (The team camp) touches on the intangibles of building team chemistry and bonding. When we went to Ulysses last year (in the playoffs), we went the night before and spent the night in Garden City. It was no different than what they do in Pitt State. They get used to a situation like that. Otherwise, it’s Oh my God (when you are in a new situation). I tell the parents it’s a chance for the young kids to experience what college is like. They get a chance to be in the big dorms, the showers are centrally located, they walk to dining halls.
“We also go to two 7-on-7 camps. We went to the Derby one and we’re going to the Bethel College one at the end of the month.

On why that’s all the 7-on-7 Mulvane does — “Our kids, it’s in every school, they are so camped out. There’s so much pressure on kids to do so many things. Not only are our kids involved in football, but basketball camp, baseball camp, playing summer baseball, trying to fit in summer vacations. We want them to commit to the  one team (contact) camp, the two 7-on-7 tournaments, which are just one day apiece, and the team camp we run at the end of July. The rest we say, do the things you want to do. We ask them to grow up so fast nowadays. I think our kids appreciate that. They want to please their coaches, they’ll do what we ask. I think we put too much on them. I was once their age, my coach was great with that. I want them to be treated like they want. Summer is summer. We do have summer weight lifting and a speed course, that we do after weight lifting, three days a week. It’s for all our athletes, not just football.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 9:33 a.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.