Jackets now start the BTS heavy lifting
♦ Players, coaches move the work behind the scenes in ongoing preparation for 2023 season
Now the work shifts behind the scenes for the Calhoun High School football team.
The spring workouts are done and the first of two GHSA-mandatory dead periods where teams and coaches can’t gather and practice/workout takes place next week when the Calhoun coaches and players put on the annual Calhoun football camp, starting Monday morning at Phil Reeve Stadium.
But don’t think that things have stopped. They may not be full-tilt boogey for the next month or so, but after the week of the July 4th Independence holiday — the second dead summer period initiated by the GHSA — practices start to rev up and before long, the Yellow Jackets will be on the field for the season opener in August against former Region 7-5A challenger Blessed Trinity in Roswell.
And the reason there are no real organized workouts over the next few weeks for Calhoun is simple.
“We share our athletes and so we’ve got a lot of players that in June or when school lets out, they’re playing other sports and that’s something we want them to do,” he said. “But in June, we have a lot of players that aren’t available as much because they’re busy playing other sports, so we really won’t start hitting it hard again now as a team until that acclimation week in July because then we’ll have all our guys in. We’ll have our full team together.”
The Jackets do have a lot of multisport athletes on the football team, but it seems those guys are still putting in the conditioning work they need to be able to go when fall camp begins for Coach Stephenson’s team.
And that’s why you won’t see the work being put in in plain sight like you just did during the recent spring workouts when the team was on the field Monday through Thursday for three weeks. And it was totally different seeing the lights on at Phil Reeve Stadium at 6 a.m., because with 40-degree temperatures and football both in the air, it often times
felt more like a November football Friday night than an late April morning.
And the spring workouts could not have gone any better, according to the coach. There was a spirit to them all with the players eager for the not-that-far-away regular season to get here.
We hope we don’t get in trouble with the coaches for saying this, but, based on what we saw at the Spring Showcase practice in full public view to end the spring sessions, the Jackets looked like, if they had to, they could play tomorrow.
We’ve covered a zillion teams in the spring over the years and we can’t say how many times we walked away from a lot of workouts, thinking, “thank heavens they don’t play tomorrow.”
But that is not the case with the Yellow Jackets.
The practices were smooth. Stephenson said he didn’t like the way a couple of them ended, because things got a little messy, but other than that, he liked what he saw overall. And with improvement always the goal, he said they were definitely
a better team at the end of the spring than when they began in his opinion.
He also said that was what the spring was all about, trying to iron out those rough finishes that occur from timeto-time so they can avoid them in the fall.
But this year, the coaches have a ton of veterans in the fold and Stephenson said there is a different vibe in the locker room now, compared to a year ago when just about everyone on the roster was a newcomer to the varsity football scene.
“It’s always good to have a lot of experienced players
and the guys that we have coming back, they all looked very good,” he said. “You go into a year with a lot of experienced players and guys who have been through a full 10-game varsity season along with a couple of playoff games and it just puts you ahead of the game.
“We know who the leaders on the team are and the players know who the leaders are and that makes a big difference because when you have leaders on the team, they handle situations that the coaches don’t even have to get involved with. So we’re super-excited about this group because of the leadership and experience I feel like we have. And now, we want the guys to just keep getting ready for the season and be ready when we start with our acclamation week.”
The Jackets have their first two games to kickoff this year on the road, first going to BT and then travelng to Atlanta’s Grady Stadium the following week to play Carver. That game replaces their originally scheduled game against Gardendale (Ala.), which decided they weren’t going to come to Calhoun this year after the Yellow Jackets went there last year.
In 2021, Calhoun and Carver both reached the GHSA state championship game in their classification with Calhoun falling to Warner Robbins in the 5A finals while Carver lost to Cedar Grove, 5626, in the 3A division. Last year, both teams went 9-4 and made it to the third round of the playoffs.
The Yellow Jackets makes their 2023 home debut at Hal Lamb Field on Friday, Sept. 1 when they host 6A Creekview. They will begin defense of their Region title four weeks later on Friday, Sept. 29 when they host Cartersville.