Recognition was a key factor in the Tuesday workout of the Bryant Hornets football team during its spring work in pads — recognition, by the players, of mistakes they made during Monday's scrimmage through watching film; recognition, by the defensive players, of the reads they needed to make to determine where the offense was going on a given play through team drills; and recognition, by everyone, that football's supposed to be fun.
"We got a lot of guys beat up (Monday)," noted head coach Paul Calley. "But we'll try to get them taped up and iced and go again (Wednesday). It does good sometimes to back off and watch film. And we need to get back in the weight room. We've made some strides in the weight room and we don't want to lose that."[more]
Of the film work, the coach said, "These guys needed to see what they did wrong on tape. Everything we had one wrong I had written down and we walked back through everything. We talked back through why we do it, why we can't do this and why we have to do that. And they understand. As they're talking to me when things are happening on the field, when they ask me questions, I know that they're learning just by the questions that they ask.
"We try to teach these guys how to play the game, why we do things in certain situations and how that makes us successful," Calley reiterated, pointing to the former Hornets who are helping to coach this spring. "It shows that they learn the game of football because we've got guys that can come back after they've (graduated) and they still understand what we're trying to do. They can help us coach these other guys. A lot of times, it's easier for them to relate to the young guys because they've been there, they can get on their level and explain it better than we can."
Enthusiasm seemed to be high on Tuesday and Calley commented on that. "We've got a good group of kids," he said. "We're fortunate that we don't have a lot of discipline problems. We've got some grade issues right now that we're working on but we don't have a lot of discipline problems. It makes it easy to come to work every day when you've got kids that are eager to learn and they don't mind working and they want to get better. The tradition we've established around here, they expect to win and they know there's some pressure on them to do that."
Looking back on the scrimmage, defensive coordinator Steve Griffith said, "We didn't play as fast as we want to play. I think it was just that it was the first time in a full scale scrimmage situation. You could tell some guys have changed positions and they're still kind of thinking things through which put them just a step behind where they needed to be.
"Finishing off the tackle — everything (up to Monday) had been kind of a quick whistle so that was kind of new to them," he continued. "We did okay but we've still, obviously, got a long ways to go. Today we came back and worked a lot of drill work to try to focus on some of the mistakes we made (Monday). Hopefully, we'll see some improvement on Wednesday when we go back to scrimmage situations.
"We had an extended period defending screens with the offensive backs, quarterbacks and receivers so they could get some work and we could get some work at the same time," Griffith noted.
"We also worked with the linebackers on getting just our basic reads," he mentioned, "understanding that when this offensive lineman does one thing, we react in a certain way. The defensive line spent a lot of time working on the same thing, making sure we read the hats of the guys and understand what they're doing and what it'll take us to. The secondary worked a lot on breaking to the football when it's in the air, making sure that when that ball gets in the air that we all take good angles to put ourselves in position to get there and knock the football down."
After Wednesday's scrimmage work, the Hornets will have a light day on Thursday, working on special teams and lifting weights in advance of graduation that night. Spring practice will wrap up with another session of full contact on Friday.
