By Ed Piper
At 5:52 p.m. on Wed., Aug. 10, La Jolla head football coach Tyler Roach called his varsity players together and told them, "This is our last heavy workout before Friday's scrimmage."
The mostly juniors and seniors, on one knee, took their marching orders and proceeded into a practice scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. "(Part of it) will be under the lights," Roach added during his pre-practice spiel.
Team members had lifted weights, pounded weighted balls with two arms onto the ground, and done step-up's onto a padded cube for 45 minutes or so prior to being called together. "Keep working," Roach, with an experienced eye, had reminded them. "I don't want you to be in (our office, indicating down the track) because you got injured (from not keeping up their strength)."
The Viking hopefuls for 2022, defending two-time Eastern League champions (one coach wore a shirt with the info), went through long-snapping (one long-snapper hiked under assistant coach Kevin Hurt's guidance), lineman blocking drills (several linemen went in pairs against blocking obstacles), and various other stations across the northern end of the Edwards Stadium field.
Before practice, Roach set up a playlist on his phone connected to a booming speaking that started with Will Smith's "Wild, Wild West"--an entrancing, pounding rhythm. A digital clock propped on top of the speaker in the northwest corner of the field counted out 8:00-minute segments for drills in Roach's highly-structured workout.
Friday's scrimmage starts at 7:30 p.m. at University City. "Early in the year you don't know where you are until you play somebody," said Roach to a reporter. "We'll run out basic offense and basic defense. Pretty vanilla. We don't want to show (coaches with scouts from other schools) too much."
Opening night is a week later, Thurs., Aug. 18, at home against crosstown-rival Bishop's. This is the only non-Friday date on the Vikings' 2022 10-game regular season schedule.
St. Augustine plucked away some of La Jolla's best coaches: Charles Bussey, Steven Dixon, and Jerome Watson, the quarterbacks coach who worked extensively with quarterback Jackson Stratton.
The approach at La Jolla seems to be the same as when a player gets injured: "Next man up." The Vikings fill the open slots with the next most-capable personnel.
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