Brent Roth, head football coach of the Perryville High School Pirates and Assistant Coach Luke Bell were putting the team through its paces Friday. It was obvious that the boys were putting in lots of effort and heart running drills and pushing practice sleds in preparation for the 2024 football season on a typically humid Missouri summer day.
After practice was over, Coach Roth — who is going into his fourth year as head football coach — shared his thoughts on summer practice.
“We did our summers a little different this year,” he said. “We actually started out the first week of June. We did some full-pad stuff. Typically, we did a camp at the end of July, but instead, we kind of spread it out.”
Roth said the team has been practicing Mondays and Wednesdays and lifting on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays throughout most of the summer.
“We practiced all of June, and then we took a week off in July,” he said. “We’ve had about 55 to 60 at practices and around 30 for the morning weights, so it’s definitely been a different schedule. We’ve never done it like this before. We’ll probably make some adjustments in the future, but the benefit of it is we got to hit each other.”
Roth said there was a reason why the team took part in joint practice during the month of June.
“So, hopefully if anybody got injured, they'd have longer to recover rather than doing all of that here at the end of July. Were just 34 days away from our first game, so if somebody gets hurt now, they’re going to be tight to miss a couple of games.”
While the team was practicing in T-shirts and shorts that day, Roth announced to the players they were going to be wearing helmets for practice beginning Monday.
“We’ve got our mandatory dead week the first full week of August,” he said. “The whole state has to take off. That means next week is our last week of the summer and we only have two practices. We’ll have weights every morning and then we also have our middle school camp. Then we’re also doing a youth camp next week. So, there’s a lot of moving parts happening next week.
“But for these guys, most of their summer work is done. We’re going to do some classroom work on Monday and Wednesday going over the playbook. We’ll give them a little test to make sure they know what their plays are, and then we’ll throw the helmets on and do a little conditioning. We’ll maybe throw the football around a little bit, but we’re not going to get too crazy next week.”
Roth said this year’s team will have quite a few return players take the field.
“We’ve got, I think, about 15 seniors this year, so almost everybody is coming back from last year,” he said. “As far as our starters from last year, we had a pretty small senior class last year, so we're expecting big things from this crew. I say that every year, but it does feel a little bit different. I think we're going to have a talented group.
“The biggest thing I told them is we gotta do the little things. And there's times we still don't do that stuff, skipping reps in the weight room or not picking up that piece of trash laying in the locker room, or forgetting your jersey for practice. Like I told them, it doesn't seem like a lot, but if you can't listen to your coach in the weight room, what makes you think you're gonna listen to him on Friday night?”