July 18, 2018 at 12:58 p.m.
Hodag football goes to camp ahead of season
Hodag football goes to camp ahead of season
The Hodags are in the midst of a four-day team camp that will conclude this afternoon in front of Mike Webster Stadium.
Rhinelander's coaches, like the rest of the high school football programs across the state, are allotted five official contact days with their team during the summer. Fifth-year head coach Chris Ferge likes to spend one of those days in early June to set up the 7-on-7 program for the summer. The rest he saves for mid-to-late July to use as a preamble to fall practice, which begins Aug. 1.
The way the calendar falls this year, Aug. 1 is on a Wednesday, giving the team only seven practice days before it hosts a four-team scrimmage Aug. 10 and another week before its non-conference opener against Prescott Aug. 17 at Mike Webster Stadium. That, Ferge said, places more emphasis than usual on this week's camp as the team tries to get a head start on what will be a condensed practice schedule.
"We need these four days because we've really been shorted by starting on a Wednesday," he said. "It doesn't even seem right that we lost two days there that I think everybody in the state needs. That being said, this is really important for our kids to be here, get acclimated a little bit beforehand. They still need to exercise beforehand with that week off, but I love that we do this right before season and get our guys ready."
Another reason this week's camp is more important than most years is the work the Rhinelander coaching staff put in with UW-Oshkosh during the offseason. While, fundamentally, the Hodags offense and defense will look similar to years past, the coaches picked up on some nuances in their meetings with the Titans coaches and this week is the first real chance to install those items into the playbook.
"We're using our plays, our formations and using run fits against them using their terminology and trying to make it work," Ferge said on Monday, the day in which most of the new information was installed. "Today we had some headaches, but also some things we're encouraged about. We look forward to moving on.
"We've got a couple of concepts that we're going to do run fits against defensively. Offensively, there's so many things we can do from one concept with all the different formations we have and motions we have. We have to kind of go slow so all the kids can get it. It's going to be simple to us, but look very complex to the other team. That's what we want."
Ferge said attendance for the camp has been strong this week, with more than 30 kids participating in the middle school session in the early afternoon and more than 40 kids in the high school session.
"That's with a lot of things going on," he said. "I'm very happy with our numbers. Our kids want to play football. They want to come out here and get better."
The Hodags are looking to build on a 3-6 campaign last fall. Rhinelander entered the offseason with momentum after winning its final two games of the 2017 season - the team's first Great Northern Conference wins since 2013.
Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].
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