Football Hi-Jinx

Almost two weeks into 8th grade football practice and I'm already going nuts.

We started with 22 players ... just enough for 2 teams. Now, with 3 players gone simple because "they couldn't do it," we're down to 19. On top of that ... our players are going on last-minute vacations to whereever and it's totally screwing up our game plan. For example, on Tuesday, we only practiced with 12 players.

Our next game is the 6th. Are we ready? Haha ... I wish we were, but today, I saw considerable progress once we got our roster back up to 18 players again. We finally got into tackling today and while right away during some tackling drills we looked a little rough (shoulder tackles, hitting too high), later on we looked damn good, in my opinion.

This year has been a change, as we were finally incorporated into the high school scheme of things -- running their plays, knowing the terminology so once they get to the 9th grade level, they have a better understanding of what's going on.

Noticing them last year as 7th graders, I had low expectations as what they were doing and how they were performing on the gridiron. Now this year, they've already shown me how smarter they've become, especially in terms of the new formations we've added to our playbook. We've already got a few plays down COLD (running plays ... no passing yet) and we'll gradually get deeper into the playbook as the season progresses.