St. Vincent and Perryville High Schools have been at work over the summer to prepare for the upcoming football season.
Perryville began full contact practice in June. According to head coach Brent Roth, the team has lighter practices in July to allow more time for any potential injuries to recover before the season starts, with heavier practices resuming in August after the dead week. He said that the team is still having to make the best of their situation practicing at the heavily damaged high school but he has seen improvements already this summer compared to this time last year.
“I’m not gonna complain about anything,” Roth said. “Last year was really a difficult year for us with us practicing in the park and not having a weight room for a little bit and not having a locker room for a little bit, so last year was definitely very difficult. This year we got back on our practice field and it’s in pretty good shape and we got a locker room right next to our weight room. Obviously we don’t have the best facilities in the state yet but hopefully we can compete with that here in the near future, but you know we’re in a good spot and we’re good there.”
The Pirates have also been involved in 7 on 7 practices throughout the summer. The Pirates season will begin on Aug. 28 against Fredericktown.
St. Vincent began full practices in July, and like Perryville, have been focusing on fundamentals early on.
“Over the summer, you just kind of want to get in there and start with the basics, the foundation fundamentals and just kind of get them out there moving and try to get them back into the shape of football and thinking about football,” coach Tim Schumer said. “We started our main summer practices in July and I feel like we had a great first week of just installing that foundation. It was a good foundation to build off moving into the second week and just keep stacking good days and getting better each and every day.”
Schumer said that as the team gets closer to the start of the season, they will ramp up the intensity and move from helmet only practices to full pads, and 7 on 7s, including one with Sikeston this week. He said he is looking forward to the season and believes the Indians will have a lot of success building off of last year.
“We’ve got a really talented group,” Schumer said. “We’re young, we’ve got a lot of turnover especially with those younger classes moving up. I feel they’ve picked up kind of right where they left off last year and seeing them kind of retain that over the year and be able to come back this summer and start using those same things we put in last year and building off of that, I felt that’s really good and that’ll kind of help us moving forward as the season progresses and we get closer to game time.”
St. Vincent’s season begins at DeSoto on Aug. 28.
