The St. Vincent football team had the chance to play against other teams when they took to the field for a 7-on-7 camp on July 21 at Kelly High School.
The camp had St. Vincent face the host Hawks and New Madrid County Central. St. Vincent coach Tim Schumer thought his team played well, but didn’t take too much from the scrimmages.
“We just want to go down there and get film on the guys when they run the plays and then watch that film and go back and fix whatever we saw and improve. It’s more of a glorified practice than anything.”
St. Vincent had its whole squad in attendance and all players competed in about 10-12 plays. However, Schumer said the 7-on-7 scrimmages can be a little tricky when it comes to running plays and recognizing defenses.
“it was good to get the guys out there and playing,” he said. “You run into the situation where teams know you are going to pass and the defenders start dropping back into coverage. If you’re trying to understand coverages sometimes it can be confusing because during the regular season that linebacker isn’t going to be 20 yards in coverage.”
Schumer said he works a lot of 7-on-7 situations in practice during the summer.
“You can take some good things out of it,” Schumer said. “However, we do a lot of things like that ourselves, too. We do some things between our offense and the JV defense working on our plays and also our coverages. We just don’t always do it against other teams except in situations like this.”
Schumer was happy to play against other teams for a change.
“It was good to see what other teams can do and be able to adapt to not knowing what is coming and not seeing it day in and day out during practice,” Schumer said.
St. Vincent has been working in a team camp the past few weeks and are nearly ready for practice to start on Aug. 7.
“Everything is moving in the right direction,” he said. “We are going to finish this week up and take the dead week of and start up. It’s nice that the season is right around the corner.”
St. Vincent will compete in a jamboree Aug. 18, before traveling to Thayer for week 1. Thayer was a challenge to find after Marceline dropped the Indians from its schedule this season. Thayer went 4-6 last season, but had won six straight district titles from 2015-2021, including winning double digit games four of those seasons.
“We needed a game and there weren’t that many opportunities popping up, and I had to do something,” he said. “They are a class 1 school and should be a good challenge for us right out of the gate.”
