CHOCOWINITY — The march toward the regular season has begun with a solid first step as Southside football coach DeWayne Kellum has received two days of quality practices from his players.
On a sunny but not too hot Tuesday morning, the Seahawks coach concluded his second practice session of the preseason and was so happy with the workout he even let his players leave early, which is a tremendous gesture by the longtime skipper.
“Even though we had sun today we had a great practice, we actually stopped 30 minutes early,” Kellum said.
Until the Seahawks can don full pads, Kellum said his main focus is to get his players as close to game-shape as possible before the practices pick up in tempo and aggression.
“All of our drills are conditioning drills,” Kellum said. “So we teach drills then we condition and we have done a lot of our patterns and worked on some of our counters.
“Defensively, there’s not a whole lot you can do team-wise so it’s been all drills and running.”
On Tuesday, the Seahawks had 47 athletes show up for practice, a number that Kellum would like to see increase.
“It’s not enough for JV, it makes us too thin,” Kellum said. “And it’s the varsity that’s thin, not the JV. But, hopefully we might have more JVs come out.”
While Kellum may not be thrilled with his player turnout, he was more than happy with the new editions to his coaching staff.
“The coaches are making it,” Kellum said. “We got some new members of our coaching staff, some old players have returned. Cedric Moore played for us in 2004 as a strong tackle and Develle Whitney, who was a wingback in 2002, is back with us and of course Jeff Carrow is our defensive coordinator and Kam Rouse, who was a great asset to us last year, is back.”
Right now, those coaches are trying their best to get the players ready for their first scrimmage of the preseason on Aug. 9 at North Pitt. That scrimmage, along with the team’s exhibition against Northside and Washington on Aug. 11 at Southside High School, will go a long way toward helping Kellum and his crew assemble their depth chart.
“When we go out there I want to see them execute and get film on them,” Kellum said. “We film practice but it’s not the same. I want to see them execute the plays we’ve been working on and tackle.”