Fenwick's offense requires plenty of repetition

MIDDLETOWN — Largely because of the kind of offense they run, the Fenwick Falcons have been using their 10 off-season workouts a bit differently than other high school football programs.

The Falcons’ ground-oriented Wing-T offense requires plenty of repetition in order for the players to get their blocking assignments right.

So that’s just how Fenwick coach Fred Cranford spends his 10 coaching days during the summer months: repetition, repetition and more repetition.

“July has been a very busy and important month for us,” Cranford said. “We like to use at least 80 percent of our days to focus on fundamentals both offensively and defensively. ... Learning to block different schemes is really important to us in our offense, so we’ve worked hard on that.”

Cranford stressed the importance of his players knowing a series of guidelines for the offense to follow, depending on what they see from the opposing defense.

“Players can’t panic when they see something they haven’t seen before,” he said. “They still need to go through the same set of rules and then apply what they know based on what they see. We’re working on getting the kids to where they can read a defense and react to it.

“Once you get a player trying to think about what he needs to do, it’s going to slow him down. With enough repetitions in practice, they’ll react and not have to think about what they’re doing. They’ll already know.”

The Falcons did participate in two 7-on-7 scrimmages — one head-to-head with Madison, and another four-way camp with Lebanon, Taft and Goshen — but they’ve mostly spent their time on their home practice field.

“Our defense has nine starters back. We’re really excited about what we’ve seen from them so far,” Cranford said. “And on offense, we have a great, young, talented group of kids. It’s going to come down to tenacity and toughness. So far so good, but we really won’t know what we have on either side of the ball until we throw our pads on and start hitting each other.”

Fenwick used its ninth of 10 allotted summer practices on Tuesday. Cranford said the team will use its 10th and final day on Thursday.

The first official day of coaching for the 2010 season is Aug. 2.

The team begins the preseason with scrimmages at Madison (6 p.m., Aug. 11) and St. Xavier (11 a.m., Aug. 14).

Fenwick’s first regular season game of the season will be Aug. 27 at Oakwood.

Contact this reporter at (513) 705-2851 or jbombatch@coxohio.com.