Varsity Kansas - The Blog

by joanna

I know there’s a hunger for football. I’ve heard the hunger pains of you readers. And now, with football practice going on, with full pads just days away, the rumbling of those pains is even louder. The football previews will start showing up in the paper on Sunday (and will continue through Sept. 4). I’ve got a first day of practice for tomorrow’s paper.

But I want to feed the beast with a little info from an area coach on an early morning practice: Rose Hill’s Greg Slade

Because school started for the majority of schools in the state before football practice got a chance to start — this is a huge difference from the past when coaches could run multiple days of two-a-days, even before classes were in session — few programs went early in the morning. Many are planning on practice beginning at 3:30 p.m. today.

But Rose Hill is doing two-a-days today and tomorrow, which meant the Rockets went from 5:40 a.m.-7:15. Which mean that Coach Slade was there at 4:40. Ooof.

Here’s his thoughts about the start of practice:

“With school starting before practice, I was more prepared, better than I had ever been. We had a chance to meet some last week, and we had camp and everything this summer, so we knew where we were at. We still met and went over things.
I don’t think (the start of school) hurt us. I was more worried about what kind of time we’d get practice wise. We decided to do a couple days of two-a-days. Usually we did four. Then our evening practices will just be a little longer, like 30-40 minutes.”

This morning: “We worked on our defense, it was a defensive morning, so we did what we’d do at any other practice. We do our conditioning in the morning, and then we don’t do near as much in the evening, when it’s warmer. But we’ve been very blessed with the weather…. We’re going right after school today. In the past we hadn’t been able to do that with the heat.”

Who showed up when this morning?

“Some of the sophomores have to be there earlier because they set up gear, and the quarterbacks have to be there at 5:30 to warm up.
In the afternoon, we’ll have quarterbacks at 3:20, everyone else at 3:30. They do pre-practices for 10 minutes, we do review sets with the skill guys and the O-linemen will walk through play review. Then we all stretch at 3:40.”

Did you sense some excitement?

“Well, I was here at 4:40. It was tough going to sleep last night. I tried to go to bed earlier.”

So you didn’t watch the Olympics?

“Well, yeah.” Slade laughed here and said the last event he saw was the women’s 100 meter final (what a race, huh?).

“I was doing a lot of preparation just for myself — getting my offensive script done for tonight. I try to get that done the night before, so I can show it to the coaches. Some days I hand it to my quarterback, so he can start digesting it.”

So that’s it from Slade. Isn’t he cool for hooking all you up? We need a line to say about someone who does blog-only interviews. You know, like Jim Rome and his thing with karma.

Any ideas out there?

So what are your thoughts from the first day? What was the practice like that you went to? (and it doesn’t have to just be football!)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 2:48 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.