By ANDREW CRUM, Staff Writer
Last season, Lopez struggled to a winless football season. But one wouldn’t know it with the optimism throughout the Lobos’ coaches and players as they started practice this week.
Lopez got a late start because they participated in spring practices, but a feeling of redemption is in the air along with the music being piped through speakers from the baseball field press box.
Lopez coach Jason Starkey was pleased by what the Lobos accomplished in the spring and already this week.
“I am a huge advocate of spring ball,” he said. “If your summer program is legitimate in your attendance, commitment and its focus, you can really bridge that gap quite successfully. What I’ve seen so far, we’ve done that, I commend my coaches for that and their offseason plan. There seems to be a pretty good transfer from what they learned in spring until today.”
Practices thus far were reviewing everything learned during the spring in regards to schemes on both sides of the ball and particularly on offense, the Lobos’ playbook.
“That’s the question about the carryover, what they remember from that month in the spring,” Starkey said. “We threw most of the (play) book at them for the first few days, so instead of taking three weeks to put it all in, we’re doing it in about four days. We do that to see what they remember, what they need to be retaught and then we’ll break it down in parts next week when we prepare to play St. Joseph in our scrimmage.”
The Lobos face the Bloodhounds in a scrimmage Aug. 21 at Canales Field.
The Lopez defense will be different this year, better designed around its personnel.
“We changed up the defense to make it easier on our kids. We had a successful spring,” Lopez defensive coordinator Raul Gomez said. “I feel pretty confident what we’re doing on defense this year. Not that I didn’t last year, but the defense we were trying to run didn’t fit our kids. Last year we were really young, we had a lot of sophomores starting, which was a bad thing last year but a good thing this year because we have a lot of experience coming back.”
After a successful summer of conditioning and in the weight room, Gomez said his defense is focusing on the little things in early practices.
“We are focusing on fundamentals, back to the basics, our techniques,” he said. “Teaching them the basics again will help them a lot. A big issue (last season) was fundamentals and the speed of the game (for young players).”
On the other side of the ball, the Lobos are focusing on the play of the offensive line during early practices. Starkey has been working with the players up front to make sure the offense prowess gets up to speed.
“If our (offensive line) goes, we go,” Lopez offensive coordinator Alberto Leal said. “We feel our defense is going to be our strong point, so we don’t want to hurt them, we want to help them out. We have to put some points on the board.”
But Starkey was ready to get back to contact practices.
“We’ll really see where we’re at,” he said. “Go to the next step of the evaluation process, because we do have a lot of young kids and some question marks. We’ll start to get those answers. After the scrimmage will be a good indicator where our kids are at individually and collectively.”
Leal was straight to the point about practices this week.
“Things are rolling around here, all the coaches seem fired up and optimistic,” he said. “I’m excited about that.”
Andrew Crum covers sports for The Brownsville Herald. You can reach him at (956) 982-6629 or via email at [email protected]. On Twitter he’s @andrewmcrum.