Bradwell Institute finished its spring-football practice with its Blue-White scrimmage Saturday morning on Freedom Field at Lewis Frasier Middle School.
A strong crowd showed up to watch the Tigers play and get a preview of the new Bradwell uniforms. The Tigers will be sporting white helmets with a blue bottom half that look similar to the Naval Academy’s.
Tigers head coach Greg Hill, who enters his second year at the helm, was pleased with progress that players made during the offseason and the two weeks of spring practice.
“We had a really good turnout of fans, parents and members of the Touchdown Club that came out to support the team for our spring game,” he said. “Our Blue-White game gives us a chance to see the growth we have made in the weight room during the winter and also what we were able to once we put pads back on in the spring.”
During the last two weeks, Hill has seen the physical evidence of the work that his players — returning starters and rising eighth-graders — have put in.
“We were able to be able to look a lot of different players in some different positions, so that was good,” Hill said. “This will give us game situation footage that we can show players to motivate them and to teach with. The returning players have shown good effort, and I’ve also been impressed with the new faces, which is encouraging to see we have future talent coming.”
One of the shining moments from spring practice was seeing more development of the offensive line.
“We are going to have a more-developed offensive line, and most the line played both ways three to four quarters, so that’s certainly going to be something that will help us this fall,” Hill said.
Defensively, the Tigers return a number of starters who started to become more cohesive toward the end of last season.
As the Tigers enter summer, they are gaining confidence but also know that they have a formidable task once Region 3-AAAAA play starts.
“We start summer workouts in two weeks, and this where the majority of the work going into the season,” Hill said. “We need to work on our speed, explosiveness, strength and also get in the best shape possible. However, the most important thing is that we have total commitment from every player and parent to our summer workouts. Commitment and hard work are two of the most-important elements to get this program back in contention.”
One area that the Tigers will continue to struggle in is the lack of depth.
“We are going to have depth issues, which is one reason that we really want to stress being in the best shape possibly,” Hill said. “Because of the depth issues, this is going to make it even more important to develop our younger players. Our younger players are going to have to be able to step up at some point during the season.”