By ANDREW CRUM, Staff Writer
This will be the only time during the season when football coaches don’t care about a victory.
For several Metro area teams, today and Saturday mark the first scrimmages of the 2014 football season. The coaches for each team are more concerned with evaluating players and hoping they come out unscathed from injury more than anything else.
“Nobody wins or loses scrimmages, it’s as simple as that. I just want to go and see where we’re at,” Hanna coach Rene Medrano said. “I don’t care about the other team does, I just want to see our kids against competition. What concerns me iswhere the Hanna Eagles are at and what we have to work on.”
Rivera coach Tom Chavez agreed.
“We want to evaluate everybody, it’s just our first scrimmage. We want to come out injury free,” he said. “We’ll probably make mistakes, but we will correct those mistakes as we keep going, especially with our young guys on offense.”
Hanna will play host to Weslaco High as Los Fresnos plays host to Donna High, Brownsville Veterans Memorial travels to La Joyathis morning and St. JosephAcademyvisits Rio Hondo tonight.
On Saturday, Port Isabel plays host to Donna North and Rivera welcomes Hidalgo at SamsMemorial Stadium.
For the players, it’s a chance to hit an opponent instead of a teammate for the first time.
“The kids are excited to go against someone else, they’re tired of hitting each other,” Medrano said.
Los Fresnos coach Clint Finley concurred. He said it’s different when it’s a different jersey on the other side of the ball.
“No doubt, they’re ready,” he said. “When you line up against the same guy, it gets monotonous. They’d like to have someone new stepping in there.”
The speed of the game is more relevant than in practices, especially for those players with little to no varsity experience. Rivera lost several starters on the offensive side and is still getting its young players acclimated to the increased speed of the varsity game. Even for Raiders, who go at full speed during practice nearly every day.
“It’s a different level, (there’s) more speed,” Chavez said. “(The young guys) have to get used to the (varsity) speed right now.”
Coaches see scrimmages as a valuable tool for the team, whether it be finding the right guy for a certain position or even finding the best quality backup.
“Some of our starters might not see a whole lot of playing time, so it’s really an opportunity to see those guys in backup roles,” Brownsville Veterans coach David Cantu said. “We’ll give them a lot of opportunities so we can have confidence in them in case they need to step up. We are looking for depth. As violent and as physical as football is, all teams need it, and we didn’t really have that last year.”
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.