WCMS football gears back up: Pioneers will look to build on 7-3 year
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The Warren County Middle School football team will begin spring practice Monday, with sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders going through workouts to prepare for next fall’s season.
Spring practices will be held each day beginning at 3:15, and lasting until around 5:15 p.m. Practices will conclude Friday, May 24 with an intrasquad scrimmage at 1 p.m. in front of the WCMS student body.
Coach Chris Madewell’s Pioneers enjoyed their best year in school history last fall, accumulating a 7-3 record after losing two of their first three games. The 2001 campaign finished with a victory over Shelbyville at the Warrior Bowl in Sparta.
This year marks the first time current eighth-graders will participate in spring drills at WCMS. Madewell noted while he is satisfied with the number of sixth- and seventh-graders who are expected to be on hand Monday, participation among the eighth-graders has been less than he had hoped.
“We’ve never had a spring practice with the eighth graders before, so they’re not used to that,” he said. “They’re not used to having football this time of year, and I think they’ve just got their minds on other sports. But I think come August a lot of them that said they didn’t want to play will be looking to join the team.”
Madewell, who along with his staff worked with new varsity coach Gerald Tidwell during spring drills with the high school squad last month, said he is looking forward to working with the program’s new offensive and defensive schemes.
“We’re excited about getting the opportunity to teach the new offense and defense to these kids,” he said. “It’s new to us, too, but you learn things better when you teach it. We’ve looked through a lot of it, on offense and dfense, but we’ll really soak it all in when we start teaching and passing it along to the players.”
The WCMS coach said Tidwell and his new assistants have already shown a great deal of interest in the middle school program.
“I’ve talked to him a lot this year, and he’s been real involved with us,” he said. “He’s been over here several times, and he’s great to work with.
His enthusiasm rubs off on the rest of us, and wehope to bring some of that over to the middle school.”
Several of the middle school Pioneers have spent time during the offseason in the team’s weight room, which has been open since late January. Madewell said an average of 20 or 25 players have participated in each session, and was especially pleased with the fact that students from other county schools were participating.
With several players from last year’s team moving on to the freshman level, Madewell said spring practice will give him a good look at some of WCMS’s younger talent.
“We’ve got some nice-looikng athletes coming in that we feel are going to help us, and help replace some we lost,” he said. “We’ve got 65 or 70 kids coming out for spring, and I feel like there’s a lot of enthusiasm among the kids that we can win now, and they’ve got some confidence here.”