Sunday, December 12, 2010

SUNNY and 70 degrees in Tucson for Practice Today

It was another normal, chamber of commerce, kind of day in the Old Pueblo today for practice. Warm temperatures and PLENTY of sunshine made for a GREAT day for a Sunday practice in December.

Today was another GREAT practice, as the team works hard to prepare for our game against the Oklahoma State Cowboys in the Alamo Bowl game on December 29th in San Antonio.

I was able to get some valuable planning done with our video coordinator, Tim Cummins earlier today. He and some of his staff will be arriving before the team in San Antonio to set up 9 meeting rooms at the hotel. His equipment will be on our Semi Truck that will be delivering at the team hotel the morning that the team arrives. We will also be sending a crew early to San Antonio, and Benny Conger will lead that group of people and he will coordinate all of the off loading of the truck at the hotel and practice site.

There are many moving parts in the movement of an entire football program for a week. It takes a lot of focus and planning to pull it off. Fortunately, we have many good people in our program, so we should have no problems.

Below are some pictures from today's practice.



Robert Lloyd is positioned to retrieve balls from the receivers during pat and go drills early in practice. Once he gets the balls from the receivers, he puts them in a bag near him. When that bag is full of balls, another manager hustles that bag of balls to the managers that are snapping to the QB's:


Billy Worthington works with Robert Lloyd to gather balls from the receivers during passing drills:


Four managers snapping to the QB's during passing drills. You can notice that Jack Banker just ran a bag full of balls for them to use that Jack and Michael Barnett gathered from players on the sideline:


Jordan Bates, Mike Baranowski, Mike Reed, and Ryan Ewalt, snap balls to the QB's during passing drills:
Jack Banker hustles to get an empty bag back over to where he and Michael Barnett are gathering balls on one sideline from receivers during passing drills:


Jack Banker and Michael Barnett work opposite sideline as Robert Lloyd and Billy Worthington during passing drills. We use 8 managers to run this passing drill. It is extremely important for safety reasons not to have balls on the ground during this drill. The tempo is FAST and it requires an enormous amount of hustle on the managers part to keep it going!

Michael Barnett hustles, as usual, to run down an over thrown ball during 1 0n 1 drills:

Mike Turner shows Ben Hulka his helmet, and tells Ben that his facemask needs to be tightened. Each of the managers are properly trained by our full time staff to know how to deal with problems with equipment that needs to be fixed on the field. Benny Conger heads up this effort of training the managers.

Hulka reaches in his fanny pak for a screwdriver so he can tighten Mike's facemask on his helmet. Each of the managers are required to wear a fanny pak with everything they need to fix things at all times during practice, just for these kind of situations:

Hulka tightens the screw on Mike's helmet:

Ryan Ewalt puts the QB balls out of the way for the next drill:

Jordan Gobel getting yellow scrimmage vest ready for the special teams period. Jordan supervises and organizes the special teams period with Coach Hammerschmidt:

David Bodzin shagging balls from the kickers and punters at one end of the stadium while team was going on:

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