Calhoun football begins Monday
Suddenly in late April, there is football everywhere. Including in Calhoun.
You have, like it or not, the USFL 2.0 playing on your television screen and in Birmingham every weekend. The North Georgia Cardinals are finishing up their schedule with games at the Calhoun Rec Center on Saturdays when they are not on the road.
But perhaps most importantly to Yellow Jacket Nation, the Calhoun High School squad, who are the defending 5A state runner-ups, will be on the field for the next couple of weeks when the black-and-Vegas-gold starts spring football early Monday morning.
“We’re very excited to get going again,” Calhoun head football coach Clay Stephenson said. “It gives us a chance to all get together again and kind of see where everybody stands. But we just kind of use the spring to start to put our team together and to start getting ready for our next season, which starts in just a couple of months really.”
The Calhoun football coaches are expecting 60 to 65 players everyday, but will not have their whole team out there because approximately 20 boys are currently playing other sports.
“It’s really a hodgepodge for us,” Stephenson said. “We’re missing some of our guys because Calhoun is a school where we share our athletes. I think we’ve got 12 of our guys running track and then six more are playing baseball and we’ve got another kid on the golf team, so we’re missing some guys that we know we’ll have after all the spring sports are completed.
“But that’s something we’re not too worried about because we’ll definitely have enough players to get some good workouts in. We won’t have everyone out there, but this is really the first step we take in putting our team together for this fall, so we’re looking forward to seeing how the guys who will be out there look and kind of seeing where everybody is.”
The players will go the first couple of days in helmets and shorts and then go a couple of days in helmets, shorts and shoulder pads before they start fullcontact in full pads on Friday of this week.
Then next week, there will be two different sessions with the incoming freshmen from Calhoun Middle School in one group and all the guys who will be sophomores, juniors, and seniors next year will be in another.
They will all be in full pads for three days before wrapping up spring ball with an intrasquad scrimmage.
“A lot of teams hold a spring game, but we’ll just have a team scrimmage to finish up because we don’t have our full team,” Stephenson said. “But for guys who are new to the varsity or are behind
a potential starter who is playing another sport and won’t be out there, this is their chance to really show what they can do. We’re going to be doing a lot of teaching and a lot of evaluating during this period, so the players who are out there need to understand that this is their chance. And we, the coaching staff, we’re excited to see the different players who will show us they deserve to be out there this fall.”
He said this is a good time for the potential front six on defense and the offensive linemen to strut their stuff because the Yellow Jackets have quite a few starters in those areas to replace.
“We’ll spend a lot of time on our lines, on both sides of the ball,” Stephenson said. “We have a lot of new faces in our front six (on defense) and on (the offensive) line, so we want to see where those guys are.
“But we’ve got a lot of places we’ll looking hard at and this is just really an opportunity for the guys who are out there to show what they can
do. We’ll keep it light for the most part because there is a lot of of teaching involved. And when it’s over, we’ll have film on a lot of guys and we’ll be able to start evaluating all the players to see where we are for next year.”
And whether it’s April or August, he and the Calhoun coaching staff want to see major effort all the time.
“I just want to see the kids go out and compete,” Stephenson said. “Right now, we have a lot of competition for jobs, so the kids need to know this is all about competition. And internal competition is a good thing. Player pushing each other to get on the field is what you want to see and we are fortunate to have a lot of that with our team. But I want to see the kids competing and getting after each other.”
He said they will work on a lot of fundamentals and foot work and the players will be spending a lot of time with their respective position coaches as they continue the buildup towards the 2022
season, which starts on Friday, Aug. 19 when former Region 7-5A rival Blessed Trinity comes to town.
“We do try to get a lot accomplished in really what is a short amount of time,” Stephenson said. “But the main thing is the players come out of it learning what we’re trying to do and what we’re looking for. Spring workouts really give you a chance to break it all down for your players and do a kind of deep dive into what you’re looking for out of a certain position and what you expect out of that player trying to fill that position.
“So we’re looking forward to the next couple of weeks. We think the players, after the season we had last year, are looking forward to it because it means we’re getting closer to the real football season. But we’re excited and we’re going to take the players that are out there and try to teach them as much as we can and continue to help them get ready for the upcoming season.”