Focusing on speed

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Pleasant Home’s Corey Sims makes a pass at the 7-on-7 tournament Tuesday night. The Eagles have been working on gaining needed speed on the field this summer at workouts. | Andrew Garner/Star-News

Pleasant Home football coach Robert Bradford said in addition to working in the weight room this summer, the team has been focusing more on getting faster on the field.

Since the beginning of June, the Eagles have been meeting on Mondays and Thursdays in 3-and-a-half-hour sessions each.

“Up to this point, I think we’ve had a very successful summer,” Bradford said. “We’ve got a 90 percent rate of everyone playing varsity football showing up. That’s always been a hard struggle being so far from town. I’ve been really impressed with their diligence and their willing to show up.”

Bradford said there are 32 players on the team total, and that on average, 27 players show up each day for workouts.

This month, the Eagles will change to a three-day workout week, adding Tuesday to the line up.

In addition, Bradford said the workouts will get more intense as the season approaches.

“What we’re doing now is pretty good,” he said. “We’ll just push them a lot harder, or have a higher standard of excellence coming in the door.”

And, what is a typical day like in your summer workout program?

“With us coming in two days (in June), we do full body workouts,” Bradford said. “We do the core lifts, bench, squat and power cling.

“We’ll always supplement with auxilliary lifts — curls, military press — just about every thing you can name,” he said. “Then, we do a pretty good job of core training, and working on our mid section. We usually devote 20-25 minutes per day on the core training.”

Tuesday night, the Eagles hosted a 7-on-7 tournament, and Bradford said the team did well in one area of the game.

“As a whole, that tournament was very good for us because it started a learning process with our kids,” he said. “I left the tournament thinking we under achieved a little bit.

“If there was a bright spot, it would be that our defensive backs played pretty well,” he said. “We had five to six passes intercepted in the tournament. I was pretty happy with that.”

Pleasant Home will play in its next 7-on-7 tournament Thurs., July 29 at 5 p.m. in Straughn.