Football season begins with Monday camps and practices

The beginning of the fall sports season came into focus on Monday, as official practices began for the Highland-Lone Tree football team while Mid-Prairie began its football camp.

Both programs had a heavy focus on offense in their first opportunity to work as a full team since last fall.

H-LT implements pistol offense

For H-LT, which officially has no mascot but frequently broke down to “Huskies” during practice, head coach Thayne McElhinney began implementing his new scheme to the players, a pistol-heavy spread offense. Stylistically, the offense is a drastic departure from last year for the Highland players, who ran a wing offense that threw only ten passes across its two varsity games. While some elements are familiar to the players coming from Lone Tree, who ran a similar scheme during the Lions’ JV-only season last fall, they have an adjustment of their own to make as they jump from eight-man to 11-man football.

“They’ve adjusted really well,” McElhinney said. “I know those kids… they’re smart kids, they’ll get it figured out.”

Caleb Wheeler took snaps at QB1 for H-LT on Monday, maintaining the job from last year’s Husky team. He’ll have much more responsibility on his plate this fall, with a large portion of practice dedicated to running basic pass concepts, such as mesh and stick, to get Wheeler and his receivers on the same page early.

“We’ve got a lot of speed, so we’re going to try to get it outside,” McElhinney said. “A lot of gap run  schemes, a lot of easy completions out in space to let our athletes be athletes.”

H-LT was able to begin official practices a week early due to its week zero game against BGM on August 21.

Mid-Prairie kicks off season with youth/high school camp

The football season began with a step into mentorship for the Golden Hawks, as the first hour and a half that the team spent on the practice field was used to teach skills to fifth through eighth graders in Mid-Prairie’s football camp.

The Golden Hawks fired passes to young receivers and defensive backs, taught prospective defensive linemen pass rush moves and monitored kickers and returners during special teams drills. According to Mid-Prairie head coach Daren Lambert, who teaches social studies at Mid-Prairie Middle School, the middle school students look up to the varsity players in the same way that the high schoolers look up to college and NFL players on Saturday and Sunday.

“It’s crazy how fast time flies, because I remember when all these high schoolers were young kids and we were coaching them and now they’re up here doing the same,” Lambert said. “

After finishing the youth portion of the camp around 6:30 p.m., the high schoolers transitioned into their camp. Lambert had a simple phrase to describe his motivation for his players this season: “unfinished business.” That unfinished business also comes with expectations, as the Hawks, who fell just short in last year’s Class 2A quarterfinals, enter the year as a consensus top ten team in the class.

“You want expectations, because that means people expect good things from you and we expect great things from ourselves,” Lambert said. “We’ve had a lot of success over the last few years, but you have to go out and  earn that success. Everything you did last season doesn’t really matter, you have to go out and earn it all over again.”

The Golden Hawks spent their first camp day working on fundamentals and rebuilding muscle memory on their basic running and play-action concepts while implementing a handful of new plays from their base packages.

Mid-Prairie will begin full practices next Monday, August 10.