Spring football kicks into high gear in Tri-parishes

It’s not the quality of play that will be seen in the fall just yet, but pads are popping again in the Tri-parish area.

Spring football has arrived and our local high schools are busy spending their afternoons fine-tuning and tweaking the little things that will be needed to win games this fall.

“I think the first thing you’re looking to do is obviously teach the fundamentals,” said South Lafourche coach Terry Farmer. “But at the same time, you can’t focus so much on it to where the kids can’t have fun. You need to just play. Play the game and scrimmage a lot. That’s what you should do in spring. Get as many kids on that field as possible.”

While getting players on the field, Farmer said evaluation is critical for a team to have a successful spring session.

Especially in a program like South Lafourche where the team lost more than 30 seniors from last year’s team, creating a pretty wide-open depth chart.

“What position is a kid going to play?” Farmer said. “That’s a big question we’re asking ourselves during practices, because we need to know where these kids need to be during the season. When spring is over, we need to know a kid’s position, so we can work during the summer on the fundamentals for that position. If a kid is in one spot and he doesn’t need to be there, then that’s a lot of wasted time that you can’t get back.”

At Vandebilt, the focus was slightly different this spring as a thin roster hampered the number of players who suited up for the team.

With the successes of all of the team’s spring sports, the Terriers were missing many of their players and a few coaches who were still fulfilling their obligations to their other sports.

Unlike at South Lafourche, Vandebilt head coach Laury Dupont said spring football is not a big event this time around.

“It’s just tough at this school to have a big spring,” Dupont said. “We’re going out there with sometimes a half of a coaching staff and we’re going out there missing sometimes 10 or 12 players, so spring is really not that big of a thing around here right now.”

With the thin roster, Dupont said it gave some of the team’s more youthful players a chance to gain experience that will allow them to be better when the stakes get higher in the fall.

“This is a good time for young kids to develop and get out on the field,” the coach said. “For us, spring is mainly for our younger kids to get some reps in.”

And even with the smaller roster, Dupont agreed with Farmer and said fundamentals are the most important aspect of the game taught in the spring season.

“It’s all fundamentals,” he said. “We don’t do any conditioning at all in the spring. It’s all about trying to look at that depth chart because obviously in high school you lose kids each year, which opens up spots for the younger guys to get on the field.”

The team’s young talent had a chance to show their stuff to Dupont on Thursday when the Terriers played a scrimmage against Terrebonne.

The teams each had two, 10-play drives and two, 12-play drives before playing two full quarters.

The play was not as crisp on the field as it will be in about three or four months. Both teams struggled with penalties, fumbles and missed tackles, but the teams both came out of the game touting progress.

The Tigers won the scrimmaging portion of the game 14-0.

“Coming into today, if you’d have seen us practice, I was a little more worried about this game than some people think,” said Terrebonne coach Gary Hill. “But I’m proud of our kids, we focused and did everything we were supposed to do … We got a lot better virtually overnight, we cleaned it up and we just played really well.”

The Tigers’ defense dominated throughout the scrimmage and swarmed to the football, keeping Vandebilt out of the endzone, and out of the red zone virtually the entire scrimmage.

“We had kids making plays on that side of the ball,” Hill said. “It just looked like to me, we have 11 kids who are loving playing football right now.”

Terrebonne quarterback Mike Williams pushes for more yardage in the team’s 14-0 spring game win against Vandebilt on Thursday. Williams and the Tigers hope for big improvements in spring practices. * Photo by CASEY GISCLAIR