USA Opens Spring Football Practice
The South Alabama football hit the practice field to begin spring practice on Monday. This was the first of 15 sessions this spring.
The first 45 minutes had both the offense and defense each working on one of the two practice fields. The offense ran a multitude of drills broken down into five minute segments. The defense used a 35-minute segment to work on coverages and blitz packages.
Later in the practice, the offense and defense met in 7-on-7 skeleton passing drills. They then worked on each of the two fields, one artificial and the other natural grass, against each other. Later another 15 minute period of 7-on-7 skeletons.
They ended the practice with a 15 minute segment of 11-on-11 work focusing on normal down and distances.
As expected, Brandon Bridge entered as the first string quarterback with Trey Fetner entering as the #2. Jereme Jones, Shavarez Smith and Marvin Shinn were the #1 receivers. Danny Woodson Jr. is still recovering from his ruptured achilles injury from last season. Wes Saxton and Braedon Bowman both shared time with the 1’s. Melvin Meggs practiced with the 2s at left guard. He was seeing full action after tearing his ACL prior to fall camp last year. Joseph Scelfo started at center for the Jags and Harrison Louden was playing at left tackle. Daniel Aust played center for the 2’s.
However, they used lots of players at several different positions throughout practice.
“I liked the energy out there today, I thought it was really good. We are challenging our guys to come out every day and get better,” head coach Joey Jones said after practice. “And I thought we had great leadership today. That’s something that we have to continue over time. If we’re going to have a great football team we need to have great leadership. That starts with our senior class and has to work its way down.”
“I know it sounds like a broken record every spring, but we have to focus on fundamentals,” Jones continued. “I told the staff we can’t get ahead of ourselves, we’ve got to perfect something and build on it and not get so far ahead where we are trying to compete and worry about who is winning in the spring as opposed to getting better fundamentally. That’s what we’re really concentrating on.”
“We had more competition last year and I thought it helped us,” Jones said. “This year, I think we’ll have as much competition as we’ve ever had at a lot of positions. Right now you can see that on the offensive line, at receiver and quarterback, and on the defensive line. We’ve got depth at certain positions, but we have to find out who our guys are who are going to play. After these 15 practices we have to know who our ones and twos are going to be because once the summer gets here it’s hard to get the other guys a lot of reps.”
The team will be off on Tuesday before returning to the practice fields on Wednesday.