WHEN THE BIG DOGS GET LET OUT
Annual Dog Pound Lineman camp allows front lines to perfect their game
In front of every quarterback and running backs this fall there are five large teammates that are giving their all on every play and opposite them are five counterparts looking to stop the incoming attack.
The battle is over the line of scrimmage, a ground game that is often highlighted by an aerial assault and no team is successful without the help of the hearty souls on their respective lines.
As the summer camps and showcases often highlight the skilled positions through 7-on-7 camps, receivers racing up the sideline or over the middle catching passes thrown by star quarterbacks, the lineman look for a week to call their own.
For one week, for the past 27 years the movers and the shakers of offensive and defensive lines from throughout the Capital Region attend the annual Dog Pound Lineman Camp.
“It started out as the Pig Pen, it was just offense, about four years into it we said let’s put a defensive component into in because I’m a defensive coach,” retired University at Albany line coach Don Mion said. “We moved it up and Mark (McQuade) and I just took it and starting doing the four days, splitting it up and going offense and
defense with it.”
This is a week of tactics, training and a focus on technique. There isn’t a single touchdown scored, a ball thrown across the middle or even a snap.
For more than 100 campers this week, the glory was in the nightly eating contest, along with knowing that they will be ready for their respective varsity practices that begin Aug. 14.
“It’s tough to be a lineman because you are doing the grunt work and is you’re name in the paper? Maybe sometimes, but here all there are lineman and that’s why we highlight them,” Mion said. “That’s why we do the eating contest and things like that because they have fun with it, but we also want to put them in as many competitive situations as we can get them into, but we want to do it with skill.”
Shenendehowa line coach Mark McQuade has been a part of the Dog Pound Camp for more than two decades, moving it to the Shenendehowa campus four years ago and was happy to see more than a sea of green at this year’s camp.
“I’m thrilled about the number of schools that are starting to come and starting to realize that there isn’t really anything like this around,” Mark McQuade said. “I would like to grow it, I would like to handle the addition of Guilderland and Columbia this year, having AA’s come in here, which tells me that it’s not just the ‘Shen Camp.’
“On the other side, if is just a Shen camp, our kids can lean on each other and make each other look good. Now when Guilderland is here, they can’t take that play off and they don’t want to take that play off. It elevates the whole camp and the same probably goes for the Mechanicville and the Greenwich and the whole thing.”
The camp started out with as few as a dozen linemen and has seen a high of 135 bruisers with 100 heavyweights taking part in this year’s camp. Of the more than 10 schools represented, most traveled and worked out in groups, but two linemen made the trip by themselves.
“You watch a young man from Scotia, comes all alone, a few years he’ll be with other kids, but there is a young kid who just came here all alone,” Mion said. “That takes a lot of courage of one kid alone, especially at a young age. But if he keeps coming here as a senior, he’ll be a stud. He’ll be really good, he’ll know his stuff.”
McQuade also pointed out one solo lineman who attended the camp from Broadalbin-Perth along with a contingent from Pittsfield.
“This is a really technical camp and some of these kids haven’t been told what to do, how to get off (the line), and haven’t played football since last October and every single one of these kids except for varsity, except for a junior who is going to be a senior right now, is moving up a level, every single one of them,” McQuade said. “There is probably some anxiety with that.
“A seventh-grade kid going to modified or from a ninth-grade kid trying out for JV this year, they are all stepping up a level, so it’s a chance for us to break down just O-line/D-line play.
It’s a little unique in that we don’t play football; it’s just a line camp.”
The four nights are filled with pushing, shoving and learning how to do the job assigned to each lineman on each and every play. The highlight for these young players is knowing that the job has been done, not by one lineman, but all five.
“We are a technical group, a smart group and because we’re that nickel concept we’re a nickel, not five pennies, we all play together and that becomes that bond or that brotherhood that you hear about all the time,” McQuade said.