High school football practices have moved beyond conditioning and camp to the first week of full-go football practice.

    

It’s exciting, but it occurred to me even more this week anyone who can successfully predict the outcome among the area teams this year should also spend some time playing the ponies at the racetrack.
I’m not gonna’ feign knowing how the Times-Union area teams will fare in 2023.
For starters, three area programs begin 2023 with new head coaches, including one who took the reins after game four last year, and another who was promoted to head coach.
Manchester’s new head coach, Eddie Fields, joins the Squires with three years of head coaching experience at Fort Wayne South Side.
Triton assistant football coach Zach Whittaker steps up this football season to lead the Triton Trojans, who will play Knox and LaVille for the last time as Hoosier North Athletic Conference (HNAC) foes.
Brad Sprunger, who took the reins following Chip Coldiron’s early season departure from Whitko, will have his first full season at the Wildcats’ helm in 2023.
Programs customarily reloading like Tippecanoe Valley and Warsaw have a significant number of returning athletes who are transferring some of their skills into different roles in the latter team’s case.
A gentleman I spoke with put it better than I could put it, and I’ll paraphrase.
This is the first year with Bart Curtis at the helm since 2018 – his first in the Lake City - where we know we have some dudes we saw perform well on the gridiron, but we don’t know how some of them will do in their changing roles.
It’s exciting to see where these Tiger gridders will appear on the field. It’s still a mystery to me.
Wawasee will look to improve on last year’s season with young starters who are no longer as green as their home uniforms.
The September 29 battle for the W Trophy at Fisher Field between the Tigers and Warriors will likely be another affair where the comparative won-loss records won’t matter.
Tippecanoe Valley – judging by their recent participation in a July official’s clinic – looks like a squad with enough speed to successfully handle its eleventh-hour reshuffled schedule due to the school being voted out of the Three Rivers Conference.
The Vikings are physical this year with some added finesse.
I wish Valley nothing but success in their transitional year as an independent, and I am excited to see how competitive the Vikings are in the “conference to be named later.”
Warsaw Tiger, too, will be a mystery to me with boys’ and girls’ squads each expecting more from at least 18 new and familiar faces to be next player up for two championship squads who lost lots of kids to graduation.
Clive Scott steps in as the skipper for the Lady Tigers following Jon Hoover’s resignation. Hoover’s squads hoisted NLC championship hardware for quite a run. The returning Lady Tigers, however, are quite familiar with Scott’s presence on the pitch coaching area traveling teams.
Warsaw’s boys’ soccer squad captured a sectional championship last year, but so many seniors playing meaningful minutes moved on. Will the Tigers rebuild or reload?
I enjoyed Thursday night’s Pro Football Hall of Fame Game mostly for the off-field interviews that added up while there were lighting malfunctions in Tom Benson stadium.
NBC did a great job of taking what would be the usual ho-hum clash of players, most who will not be on the 53-man roster let alone the practice squad and keep things interesting with Hall of Fame inductee interviews.
This is a game where some of the most obvious starting players won’t even dress on the sidelines. Aaron Rogers, who moved from the Green Bay Packers to the New York Jets in the offseason, spent the evening in civilian clothes wearing a headset if this tells you anything.
The icing on the cake for the NFL’s (traditionally) first preseason game was hearing the booming baritone voice of PA announcer Alan Roach. He’s the voice of the Colorado Avalanche in the NHL, and he seems to be the NFL’s go-to announcer for its biggest neutral events including Super Bowl LVII last February.
He is, to professional sports PA announcing, what Dawes Butler was to Hanna-Barbera cartoon voice-over work.
I’m wired to be a guy who - as Clint Eastwood said playing Dirty Harry Callahan on the big screen – “gots to know.”
This fall high school sports season, however, isn’t troubling me as much as such uncertainty usually triggers some unwelcome consternation.
The sports dead zone is finally behind me. Goodbye ho-hum July.