El Dorado News-Times
Three-time defending 2A state champion Junction City opened its season Monday morning with 38 athletes. The Dragons were scheduled to focus on offense in the afternoon workout.
Coach David Carpenter said the Dragons did some refresher courses from the spring.
“We were just making sure we could still line up, just going over all of our little, old base things, trying to refresh everybody’s memories from the spring until now,” Carpenter said. “Just go over it and check it and do all of the fun little things you do.”
Junction City is coming off a 13-0 season and own a 40-game winning streak. Last year’s squad graduated 15 seniors, however, including Division I signees Jamario Bell (Arkansas) and JaQwis Dancy (LA Tech.).
Despite the toll graduation took on the roster, Carpenter said the coaches aren’t working with new faces.
“They’re just going to have to fill in the gaps,” he said of replacing last year‘s seniors. “We’re replacing them with juniors who are now seniors, guys who have been in the program. Sophomores that we’re going to have to use, they moved up with us last year after their season was over with. It’s still the same guys coaching them in junior high as it is high school so that’s a plus. They moved up and got eight weeks of practice in with senior high going over all of this stuff last year. That’s a huge plus.”
Speaking after the morning practice, Carpenter said the afternoon session would be more of the same, except on the other side of the football.
“Offensive practice in the afternoon,” he said. “Go over all of our base stuff so in the upcoming days we can start adding in with the new and deleting some of the old. Right now, we’re just back in the old learning curve.”
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After falling agonizingly short in the 3A state championship game last year, Smackover returned to the practice field to with the hope of making a return trip to Little Rock.
“I saw a lot of hungry guys today,” said Smackover coach Brian Strickland. “We know we’ve got unfinished business, and they want to get back. The guys came back ready work and in pretty good shape. Our theme is the unfinished business in Little Rock last year, and that’s the goal. We want to get back, but we’ve got to play them one at a time.”
Strickland said the Bucks’ first day featured plenty of work on fundamentals.
“It was a normal first day,” Strickland said. “We had a lot of movement and worked on conditioning. We did a lot of drill work.”
As far as today’s practice is concerned, Strickland said the focus will be on defense.
“We’ll take our three hours, go to work and try to get better,” Strickland said.
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After missing the playoffs last fall, Strong started their preparations with an evening practice.
“I think there’s a lot of pride in our locker room,” said Strong coach Craig O’Neal. “We feel like we’re capable of doing more than what we did last year. Sometimes the playoffs work in your favor, but then you can get in a situation like we were last year.
“We feel like we can do a little bit better. There’s a lot of pride out here about putting a team on the field at Strong. The kids want to represent this school, and I think we want to prove to people that we’re still playing football out here.”
O’Neal said his team’s practice had plenty of energy, but he is hoping his numbers will improve some.
“We had exactly 20 show up tonight,” O’Neal said. “I was pushing for 25, but we’ve got a few that have worked out with us sporadically this summer, so if those guys are serious, we need everybody to commit full time right now.”
Although Parkers Chapel qualified for the playoffs last year, the Trojans are aiming for a longer stay in the postseason, and coach James Housdan was glad to get started. “It was great to get back out on the field for the first official practice,” Housdan said. Housdan added that the Trojans worked on offense on Monday, and they will turn their attention to defense today.