Fall sports practice officially underway
Jim Downey | Herald-Standard
The Falcons’ Luke Peperak works through an agility drill Monday morning during the first day of soccer practice at Connellsville Stadium. Football, boys and girls soccer, golf and cross country, and girls volleyball, tennis and field hockey officially began practice on Monday. The first play date for boys and girls golf is Thursday, girls tennis is Monday, Aug. 20, and the remaining sports is Friday, Aug. 31. Football teams have the option to play a Week Zero game on Friday, Aug. 24.
Ed Thompson
Belle Vernon’s Joey Federer finds an opening and scores after a taking a handoff from Jared Hartman in Monday’s first official football practice of the season at James Weir Stadium.
Jim Downey | Herald-Standard
The grounds crew works on cutting the grass in the end zones at Connellsville Stadium, Monday morning, as the boys soccer team opened the first official practice for the fall sports season.
The first official day of fall high school sports practice brought an array of weather: nice in the morning, hot and humid around noon and scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon.
The special day brings a mix of emotions for local football, soccer, volleyball, golf, cross country and tennis teams, however, according to the coaches.
“My kids are somewhat disappointed because their summer is coming to an end, along with probably every other athlete in western Pennsylvania,” Laurel Highlands cross country coach Bob Costello said with a laugh.
Most coaches still enjoy Day One, though.
“You don’t lose that excitement over it,” longtime Mapletown football coach George Messich said. “You really look forward to that first day and getting the kids here to work.”
“It’s always exciting the first day,” veteran Jefferson-Morgan golf coach John Curtis said. “I still get excited to get back at.”
Messich isn’t one to wish for extensive heat at practice.
“People think coaches want it real hot and humid,” Messich said. “Personally, I’d like to see it 78 and overcast every day during camp because I think you get a lot more done on days like that.”
While small school rosters go up and down from year to year, Monessen second-year coach Mikey Blainefield was all smiles when he saw the group he had on Monday.
“We’ve got some more numbers this year so that helps us at practice a whole lot more,” said the former Greyhounds star. “Not being able to have an 11-on-11 practice in the past made it rough. It helps me to appreciate having the numbers that we have now. It’s been a blessing.”
Heat acclimation, which took place last week, is a fairly new rule that many coaches believe is very helpful heading into the beginning of practice for several reasons.
“Heat week was really good not only for conditioning, but, because it gave us time to bond and become a little closer,” Uniontown second-year coach Cedric Lloyd said. “But kids haven’t had all that gear on so I want to phase it in still slowly. Helmets the first practice, helmets and pads the second practice (both on Monday) and then tomorrow we’ll start in full gear.”
There’s more to the first day of practice than just practice, according to Curtis and Waynesburg Central girls soccer coach Joe Kijowski.
“Usually our first day I’ll pass out schedules, make sure everyone has their physical, make sure everybody’s got their spikes,” Curtis said. “We go over all the rules and regulations and see who needs golf balls, who needs tees, do you have an umbrella in your bag, just make sure everybody’s got everything ready to go.
“Then after all that we hit a couple buckets of balls and we check on everybody’s swing and try and make some corrections. Tomorrow we’ll go to Greene County Country Club, do some putting and chipping and get nine in.”
There are meetings to attend as well.
“We start off with the parent meeting and then you have your team meeting,” Kijowski said. “Then after that we’ll get right into it like a normal practice, hopefully get some of the new faces in there and comfortable with some of the faces that have been there awhile, and just try to form our chemistry. Every team is different every year. We’ve got to try to see what our chemistry is like this year.”
Kijowski’s squad is coming off a WPIAL championship season, but he feels that means little in 2018.
“At the beginning of the season something like that seems so far away,” Kijowski said. “We just want to get back to basics and concentrate on taking one day at a time. We’ve got to forget about last year and just re-focus on what we have to do to get back there this year.”
Frazier girls volleyball, although having to adjust to being moved up one classification, has the luxury of pretty much a full roster returning.
“This is a little bit different for me this year just because I have my entire team returning,” Lady Commodores coach Mandy Hartman said. “We’re also addressing the challenge of moving to Double-A. I’m looking to take these girls to the next level.
“When you don’t lose anybody it’s easy to walk in the gym and just continue, just pick up where you left off. But I really don’t want to do that. We’ve had a lot of kids in the offseason that have worked really hard. They’re pushing each other which is great. Any time you can create competition in your gym, it makes you that much stronger.
“I’m excited for this week and excited for this season and the challenge of playing in Double-A and playing some new teams and a new schedule. Now that the initial shock set in, we’re excited for it.”
While Hartman is a longtime coach at Frazier, Blainefield and Lloyd are coaches coming off their first full seasons with their respective teams and that full year makes a difference.
“It was very smooth,” Blainefield said of Monday’s practice. “We got to make some contact this morning and it went pretty well.”
“I like where we are. We had a great offseason,” Lloyd said. “We’re looking forward to actually getting going now.”
While the first day of practice is a drastic change in some sports, it’s a more seamless continuation in cross country.
“It’s basically an extension of the conditioning we’ve done most of the summer,” Costello said. “We get in, do our warm-ups, stretch. But the intensity comes up a little bit more. You’re getting close now, the kids can start to feel it and they’re getting excited.
“We’ve got our workouts planned now for what we want to do from now up until the end of the season. Of course, the weather will obviously dictate what we can or cannot do, but we ran in the morning today and will continue to do that for the next two weeks until school starts.”
The vast array of sports now available in the fall sometimes takes its toll on certain programs.
Brownsville girls tennis coach Dan LoNigro is in such a situation.
“I went to practice and had two girls standing in front of me on the tennis court,” LoNigro said. “I have six, but one went to the doctor’s and three more were on vacation. But you need seven. So what do you do? You say, ‘Alright girls, who do we know that’s not doing anything out there?’ And we start spreading the word and try to recruit some girls.”
LoNigro’s boys tennis team will be in a co-op with Frazier and he is hoping to eventually do the same with the girls.
“The addition of extra sports, such as soccer, has taken away my top four girls. Some of them played both sports last year, but they cannot do both this year. So I’m hard-pressed now. These girls were torn between soccer and tennis and they went with soccer because they’ve been playing that since they were little girls. So it’s tough now. It’s another rebuilding year for me.”
LoNigro made the most of the situation Monday.
“We practiced though, with the two girls we had,” he said. “They got a lot of hitting in. We worked pretty much 2½ hours on their forehand today.”