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Columbia coach Brian Allen. (FILE) -
Fort White coach Demetric Jackson. (FILE)
Spring football practice was scheduled to begin Monday.
Instead, teams won’t see the practice field until summer at the earliest due to covid-19.
The Florida High School Athletic Association canceled all spring sports last week, ending spring football before it ever began. It’s uncharted territory for local coaches, one that will set programs back as they try to prepare for the upcoming season.
Spring practice is an opportunity for coaches to start figuring out their depth charts and for young players coming up from JV to learn the varsity game. It’s also a chance for backups from a year ago to seize starting jobs left behind by seniors.
That’s the case for several positions at Columbia, which lost 20 seniors, but none more so than the quarterback position. No spring football means Columbia coach Brian Allen won’t get a chance to groom Jordan Smith’s replacement, which will be no easy feat after Smith set the school career passing record.
Kade Jackson was Smith’s backup last season but would have been tied up with baseball through at least a portion of spring practice. But that also would have given Allen some time to find another quarterback to compete with him, which likely would have been rising sophomore Bronsen Tillotson.
Instead, Allen won’t get a chance to work with either of them, which he says is one of the biggest downfalls of losing spring football.
“I’m trying to figure out who that next guy is,” Allen said. “That’s definitely one of the key places for what we’ve been doing here the last five or six years now offensively. You have to have a quarterback back there that can spin it and know where they’re going with it, why they’re going there with it. We never even got started with our 7-on-7 stuff so that puts us behind. Now not having spring, summer is going to be crucial to us being able to have a successful season.”
In fact, Allen is even more worried about losing summer conditioning than he is about spring’s cancellation. The Tigers have won at least eight games in seven of Allen’s nine seasons at the helm and he points to his summer conditioning program as a big reason why.
“I’m really more concerned with what’s really going to happen this summer because that for me, more than anything, is why I believe we’ve had success,” Allen said. “Spring is important to know who your new guys are and guys that can step up into their roles but I’m more concerned about what’s going to happen this summer. What’s going to be the outcome of when we get ready to get into summer workouts and all that stuff.”
Fort White coach Demetric Jackson says the loss of spring football will have a huge effect on his program. The Indians lost four seniors on their offensive line and three linebackers as well, meaning spring was going to be a crucial period to get those replacements groomed and ready for the fall.
Now Jackson will have to rely on the summer, whenever teams are allowed to begin conditioning. That is still in question.
“It’s going to set us back,” Jackson said. “There’s a lot of teaching and fundamentals that you get done during the spring and it’s an opportunity for the young kids to learn your system. It’s going to be very important that they really come out during the summer.
“Small schools and rural schools, it’s hard to get all your players in during the summer, so spring was definitely important that they all be there and get all the good work in. Now you have to rely on your summer, which is even more important for the guys to get there and kind of get a learning curve on what we’re trying to do.”
In the meantime, Allen and Jackson are both keeping in touch with their players via texting, FaceTime and Hudl. But setting up a big team meeting, such as via Zoom, like colleges and NFL teams have done, isn’t very plausible considering not every player has a computer or Internet access to be able to join.
It was an idea floated to Allen but one he quickly realized wasn’t realistic.
“When you think doing something virtually, college is completely different because everybody has a computer,” Allen said. “Everybody has Internet when you’re talking about college kids. When you’re talking about high school kids, I don’t even know if I would be able to get 50 percent of the team if I tried to do a zoom meeting and stuff like that because a lot of these kids solely work off of their phones. So it would be tough to try and do it.”
The fact that other teams are all dealing with the same setback has helped put Allen’s mind a little at ease.
“The big part of it when I sit here and talk to myself about the fact that we’re not doing it and we’re not practicing, we’re not in the meetings, not learning — no one else is too,” Allen said. “So that, I guess at the end of the day, makes you feel a little bit better that nobody — unless they’re going against the state mandates — nobody else is getting a jump on you from the sense of them being able to work out and all those things.”
Now coaches will wait and see if they can return to the field for summer conditioning in June. There’s questions whether they’ll be able to but there’s also concerns that the high school football season may not even start on time in August.
“We really don’t know what this virus is going to do and what the state is going to do,” Jackson said. “We really want to play but we’re mainly concerned about everyone’s health and well being. So we’re praying that we get back to some normal activities and we’re hoping that they can release us and let us go back to summer workouts like we normally do. But if they don’t then we’ll obviously have to make some adjustments and follow the protocols that they set forth.”