Terez Paylor’s Training Camp Tour: Day 1
By TEREZ A. PAYLOR The Kansas City Star
Do you feel it? It’s that time of year again. Football season is here, and if you’re anything like me, you’re probably as pumped as I am. As many of you know, I cover the East Kansas League for The Kansas City Star. I’ll also be covering Mill Valley, De Soto, St. James Academy, Spring Hill, Maranatha and KSD - and that’s just in Johnson County.
With that said, over the next two weeks I’ll be checking out practices for each team I’m responsible for in an effort to get ready for our Johnson County high school football preview. I’ll be posting a new blog each weekday with whatever extra details I can scrounge up on the team I visited the previous day. So if you’re a player or a parent of a player on one of those teams, I’ll be coming to a school near you soon.
I made it out to a couple of practices on Monday, which was the first day teams could practice in Kansas. But let’s kick off this blog with Louisburg, which went 13-1 and made it all the way to the Kansas 4A state championship game last year. I’ll start blogging about Johnson County teams on Wednesday.
And as always, if you have any story ideas, please e-mail them to me at tpaylor@kcstar.com.
Louisburg
There are young teams, then there are really young teams. Louisburg is the latter.
The Wildcats return one starter on offense and none on defense from last year’s team, which went 13-1 and made the 4A state championship game. Replacing star running backs Jason Spradling and Derrick Rowan will be hard enough, but coach Gary Griffin basically has to replace an entire team.
Not that he seems to be too worried about it. He was calm at the Wildcats’ practice in the afternoon on Monday, giving his young players plenty of pointers and doing a lot of teaching.
“Coaches that really like the fundamentals of coaching are going to like a year like this,” Griffin said. “Last year, everyone knew we were going to be good, and it added stress and pressure that the coaches didn’t necessarily like and the kids didn’t need.
“They don’t need to feel like if they lose a game or don’t make it to the state championship game, they failed,” Griffin continued. “And that’s kind of how our kids felt last year. There was pressure every game.”
Suffice it to say, this year’s team feels no such pressure.
“They hear what people are saying about them, that they’ll be lucky to go 5-4,” Griffin said. “That’s not what they want.”
And although Griffin knows it will be awhile before he knows what kind of team he has, he’s looking forward to helping his squad get better.
“It’s a challenge, but coaches like to coach,” Griffin said. “What I’m looking forward to this year is seeing how much they improve by the end of the year.”
•For Wednesday: Blue Valley West
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