Head coach Chad Long speaks to his team during the intersquad scrimmage.
FREMONT – It is just past 4 p.m. on July 31, and the 2017 Fremont Ross football season is about to begin. The Little Giants have walked the three blocks from their lockerroom at Don Paul Stadium to the practice fields behind Ross High School but they’re running a few minutes behind schedule.
Assistant coach Bill Schell demands the players at the field tomorrow on time and ready for his whistle at exactly 4 p.m. Even the slightest indication the team is ill prepared will not be tolerated, not after a 2016 season that saw a 3-7 record and a 2-5 mark in the Three Rivers Athletic Conference, the team’s second-straight losing season.
Working hard is the point of emphasis for the day and no one is immune, but the players who have not yet turned in their physicals, and therefore ineligible to practice, have it the worst. They’re sent to Tatum’s Beach.
A dozen or so players are sent to the team statistician and – for today at least – medieval taskmaster, Tatum Diedrich, for a couple hours of grueling calisthenics around the practice football and soccer fields. Countless Up-downs, hundreds of yards of crabwalks and anything else Diedrich dreams up. Within a day or two all physical forms are turned in.
Statistician Tatum Dietrich runs players lacking their physicals through calisthenics during “Tatum’s Beach.”
Everything comes down to accountability and the coaching staff pounces on every teachable lesson. By the end of the evening, as the Little Giants make their way back to the stadium, close to five hours later, head coach Chad Long knows his players received the message.
“The first day is always a mess,” said Long, entering his second season at the helm of the program. “The kids are trying to feel out how practice is going to go and so forth, so it’s typically a mess.
“Overall, I do like what we saw. I know the kids are dead. They’re dead tired right now.”
While today is officially listed as the first day of practice, putting in the work for the 2017 season began long ago. Summer camp days, lifting sessions and 7-on-7 scrimmages have kept the team busy and helped the Little Giants install a new offense. Gone is the strict adherence to three-back sets and easy-to-predict plays. Ross intends to keep defenses guessing about what is has up its sleeve.
But perhaps the moment of the summer that will have the biggest impact throughout the season was one night the weekend prior to the first practice.
The coaches and their seniors had an overnight camp at East Harbor as an exercise to build camaraderie and have the team’s veterans take ownership of the season to come. There the team played games, beach volleyball and went swimming in 5-foot waves. But that evening, around a campfire, they were reminded of what they’re playing the game for: Each other.
Players raise their helmets as the sun sets on their first day of practice.
“We all learned something new about each other,” said senior tight end/linebacker Andrew Edmonds. “We had to share something we’ve never shared before and say something about our personal lives and it helped us bond more.”
Said senior receiver/defensive back Roger Burling: “We know we’re going to be there for each other and we know where everybody came from, all the good, all the bad. We know we’ll be there for each other.”
Soon after they returned from camp, the seniors rearranged the dressing stalls in the lockerroom. Gone are the rows that forced players into small groups and in their place is a wide open main area, with chairs and sofas with the lockers all facing inward, so the players can see one another.
“Originally, the lockers were rowed off and it went freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, and that’s not how a team should be,” senior linebacker Ben Rozzell said. “A team should be together, so we opened it up and everybody can see each other and we’re interacting together.”
Dress rehearsal
Head coach Chad Long speaks to his players prior to their first intersquad scrimmage.
It is Saturday, Aug. 8 and in an hour the Little Giants will meet their first opponent of the season: Themselves. It is their intersquad scrimmage and the prospect of donning pads, hitting and doing so in front of a crowd of a few hundred people at Don Paul Stadium has spirits high.
The music of Drake, Chief Keef and Wiz Khalifa blare from the stereo while players bob their heads, sing along and joke with one another in their wide-open lockerroom. The first week of practice is coming to a close and Ross is ready to end it on a high note.
Adding to the excitement, this will be the first time this season the team steps into the stadium. Since taking over the program last year, Long and his staff have limited the use of Don Paul Stadium to games only, opting to walk the few blocks to the practice fields behind the high school.
“The kids get excited to be out here,” Long said. “If you’re here all the time, it becomes routine. If you take that away from them and make it into a Super Bowl whenever you get on here, that’s awesome. That’s what we want with these kids, to get excited. (It’s) not just another practice, it’s game time.”
Ross players took part in an Oklahoma hitting drill before their intersquad scrimmage.
The enthusiasm shows early on, as the team does a series of Oklahoma hitting drills. The pads pop as players clash and struggle, trying to force their will on the other. The drills shift to position groups and the first miscues show. Several of the team’s veteran receivers bobble and drop passes they should complete. After another ball falls to the ground the offense is tasked with a set of down-ups and chastised for their sloppiness.
Soon the first team offense faces off against a scout team defense and looks crisp. Quarterback Hayden Lehmann shows off his strong arm while running back Remey Bulger barrels his way into the defense and requires multiple tacklers to bring him down.
The offense scores on each of its possessions, moving the ball effectively, but the defense, scout team though it may be, didn’t show its entire hand.
“We didn’t do a whole lot against our offense today,” Long said. “We’re an aggressive defense, we loop and blitz and we’re hard to stop. But for our offense today we wanted to slant and angle and so some single blitzes, and the offense did a good job picking it up.”
Edmonds provided the highlight of the evening catching a pass, after it had been deflected by a defender, while falling backwards into the end zone. The play received a round of cheers and applause from the crowd in the stands who came for their first look at the Little Giants.
Asst coach Mike Rankin talks to the defensive line during the intersquad scrimmage.
“He’s a senior showing great leadership,” Long said of Edmonds. “He’s a National Honor Society student and he’s smart, he can play anywhere on the field and know everything about the offense. It’s nice to see him come out here and perform.”
As the first team defense meets the scout team offense, the defense shines. The line, anchored by Shawn Newsome and Dontrez Brown, has the makings of a shut-down group, especially as the unit’s stamina builds.
Though the defense kept the scout offense largely under wraps, it also fails to produce turnovers, something the Little Giants became accustomed to doing a year ago, having generated 30 takeaways.
“We have to continue pursing to the ball, I don’t think our hustle was there as much,” Long said. “We’re a defense that swarms to the ball and when we get to the ball have two of three guys rip at the ball. We get a lot of turnovers but we didn’t get to the ball.”
Overall, the night showed what any intersquad scrimmage would show at the end of the first week. There were some moments of promise and flash, but also mistakes, both mental and physical.
Boom and bust
Quarterback Hayden Lehmann throws a pass to a receiver during the intersquad scrimmage.
It takes just a moment for the Little Giants to flash what, they hope, will be a common sight this season.
On the first play of the preseason against another team, Northview, in a scrimmage on Saturday, Lehmann launches a pass that hits Burling in stride in the end zone. One play. Forty yards. Touchdown.
It’s an explosive start, and an indication of the combustible potential Ross possesses.
Not to be outdone, the defense then shows itself capable of being a true shut-down unit. In four plays, the defensive front swarms and Brown and Newsome combine for three sacks. A couple plays later, Buldger comes up with an interception.
Despite the highlight plays, the Little Giants have the look and feel of a racehorse desperate for the gate to open while the coaches hold the reins back, waiting for the real race to begin.
Receiver Jerardo Eckford catches a pass in warm-ups before Ross’ scrimmage against Northview.
“We’re very vanilla,” Long said. “There were a lot of two-back sets we would have jumped into, based on what (Northview) were doing. It would have been a very different game. It’s tempting, very tempting, because we’re all competitive guys and we want to win. But lo and behold, we’re staying with what we’re doing.”
Ross will continue to holds its cards close to its vest when the Little Giants go through their final dress rehearsal, Thursday at 7 p.m. at Sandusky Perkins, before, finally, opening the playbook on both sides of the ball. Ross opens its season Aug. 25 at home against Holland Springfield, a team that went 10-1 last season and defeated the Little Giants 51-32.
Ross makes mistakes against Northview which need to be addressed. A missed block, a runner misreading the hole, a wrong route run by a receiver, a poor throw to an open man. They’re the kinks that come with playing a different colored jersey for the first time, but they’re also the blunders that will prove costly when the game is real.
Long calls the overall performance “a little sloppy” but also correctable.
The lights are shining bright in Don Paul Stadium as the scrimmage closes. Such are the expectations for the 2017 Ross football team that despite largely controlling the play in the scrimmage, the coaches and players have mixed feelings about their performance. The explosive flashes are not enough to overpower the inconsistencies in between.
Ethan Chumley carries the ball during Ross’ scrimmage against Northview.
The team will be back in the stadium the following morning by 8 a.m. to study the film, note the mistakes and begin the process of not repeating them.
It is the end of the second week of practice. Two weeks remain until Springfield comes to town.
And work remains to be done.