The vision and effort three Big Island coaches will have to invest in their football teams this summer is something none of them have had to do in their careers.
Every coach at every high school and college always uses the offseason to invest in some level of self-scouting, to mentally picture what their team has been doing, consider the benefits and hazards of that approach, and then calculate what tactical changes can make that team better in the approaching season.
Nothing new there for Chris Midel at Pahoa, DuWayne Ke at Ka’u or Chad Atkins at Kohala. Nobody tries to do exactly what they did the previous year for the simple reason that every coach knows there’s a way to make their teams better.
More players help, one can only assume, but that’s a bit of an issue for the three Big Island schools transitioning from 8-man to 11-man football for the first time this fall.
“It’s going to be fun to do,” said Midel, “just as far as having more toys to play with, you could say, but how it will all fit together? That’s not something I can tell you right now, because I don’t know.”
One of two assistant athletics directors, Midel is in the school on a daily basis, sees kids in classes and walking the hallways who he envisions might be a fit for the 11-man team, but beyond that, he knows very little about their desires.
“I talk to these kids,” he said, “and right now, I’ve got somewhere in the high 40s in terms of kids who say they want to turn out, but the summer is going to tell the story, in my opinion.
“All these kids need to be working out, at the very least running, staying in shape, if not a more complete program; they can’t just show up at the first practice and try to get in shape.”
At the end of July, Iolani High School on Oahu will bring its coaching staff and players to the Big Island for a series of clinics that will involve all three former 8-man teams, and there are other camps and clinics available, as well. Will the prospective new players take advantage?
“The good thing about it,” said Kohala’s Chad Atkins, “is that all of us coaches have an 11-man background, so it will be getting back to doing what we know best. Coaching 8-man is kind of difficult because you don’t have the creativity that you do with 11-man, you’re limited in 8-man, just by the numbers.”
Atkins will be the beneficiary of a surplus of players in his area who are ready for 11-man football. Last year, there were more players who opted for the unlimited level in Pop Warner football than there were involved in Kohala’s 8-man team.
In 8-man, playing a zone coverage on defense gets to be challenging, fast, there’s so much room to cover with few players who can only be successful if they work with each other constantly. In 11-man football, those options are more easily confronted.
“We have a lot of kids who just didn’t play (at Kohala) last year because they wanted to play 11-man,” Atkins said. “Honestly, 8-man got a little stagnant. Before the season, you knew what the two other teams had, you knew you’d be playing them over and over and it was kind of boring.
“This is going to be more exciting for them and it will be more fun for me. Last year we started with 23 kids and finished the season with 18. Right now we have 40 who have signed up and said they want to play.”
Atkins and the other coaches all know this is the most optimistic time of the school year in terms of looking ahead to the next football season. Everybody wants to play in the springtime, then after grades come out, those numbers shrink a little, historically. After practice opens, attitudes — the kind you don’t want on a fully functioning team — come into play and a few others fall off.
“You never know how many of these kids will still be there when you get to the start of the season,” Atkins said, “but you hope you keep most of them.”
Then comes the challenge of plugging players into positions. Atkins may have a surplus of 11-man players ready to go that Ka’u and Pahoa don’t share.
As an example, in 8-man football, the offensive line consists of three players, a center and a guard on either side. In 11-man football, that vital section of the squad goes from three to five. Let’s say the three players from last year are back, and here comes some new kids who look like offensive lineman, maybe even bigger than the returners. Who plays where?
Do you trust the new kid who looks like a tackle, a quarterback protector, on the outside of the line? Does it makes more sense to put that new guy inside at guard with a veteran center and veteran lineman on either side, or is that over-thinking the issue?
“I feel like it’s good to go from 8-man to 11-man because we all have 11-man backgrounds,” Ke said, “so it’s getting familiar again with what we already know. If we had to go from 11-man to 8-man? That would be much harder, in my opinion because you’d be telling kids to unlearn what they know about 11-man and learn these other ways of doing things in 8-man.”
Ke has mostly been a running game coach in 8-man, but with 11-man, and more players turning out?
“Who knows?,” he said, “we might find we have two or three guys who can really catch the ball, and with more protection for the quarterback, we might be a passing team.
“You have to be the kind of team that emphasizes the strength of your players,” he said. “I think we’d all like to be working on that now, but at the moment all we can do is wait and see what we have to work with.”
And then put it together in such a way that you look like a real football team that knows what it’s doing when the first kickoff comes in the fall.
Contact Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com with comments and suggestions on people and teams in the area.
