WOW... time sure flies when you’re having fun!! It’s been almost two weeks of practices since I last posted, but it almost doesn’t feel like it.
Practices have been pretty much going at about the same pace each night. Warm-ups, circuit drills, tackling fundamentals, skill specific drills, then defensive unit drills and then a quick offense against defense walk thru. Most everything is going at ¼ speed since we still need to work the steps and fundamentals and we still are not wearing pads yet. It really doesn’t feel like we are even working that hard, yet by the time I get home, the body is usually aching pretty good.
As far as the defense goes, we’ve been adding stunts left and right to our base defense and having fun with it. Most of them are pretty much modifications off of the stunts we ran last year and so we’ve been picking them up rather quickly. A couple of them though are pretty risky “bet the house” type stunts that leave one or two players covering the majority of the field. The scarier thought is it seems to be me that is often left with the “monstrous” task. We actually have introduced man coverage, which is not something we ever really dealt with last year. I have to admit being a bit skeptical about it, we were actually very good against the pass last year playing nothing more then a cover 3 zone and I wonder how well disciplined we can be to maintain a good man coverage. I guess time will tell, and it doesn’t mean we necessarily have to use it.
Of course my body seems to have hit that first brick wall of the season. The body has been aching like crazy the last couple of practices and the mind starts doing that debate of whether you really want to do this or not. The shins pretty much burn 24/7 right now and doing shuttle runs makes me want to scream with pain each time I pivot on the line. The knees are so creaky and sore that after sitting in a 2-point stance for almost an hour, you have to argue with yourself about whether you can get up off the floor. Just 20 minutes of tackling drills have found me laid out on the floor trying to stretch out the lower back so the muscle spasms stop. Thankfully, the desire to play far outweighs whatever pain manages to come, and at least this year, I have the joy of knowing it will soon go away once the body has adapted.
Of course Sunday’s practice is cancelled due to the Superbowl, so a night off and hopefully a good party to go to may also do wonders for me as well!
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