ROCKINGHAM — It’s a race against the calendar for the Richmond Senior football coaching staff.
Under the direction of first-year coach Mike Castellano, the Raiders are having to learn new offensive and defensive schemes and terminologies.
And do it before Aug. 11, when Richmond will welcome Millbrook back to Rockingham for a scrimmage game. The Wildcats knocked the Raiders out of last year’s 4AA playoffs with a 28-27 win in the second round.
On paper it appears as if there is plenty of time for the players to pick up the new systems, but there are dead periods during this time.
Richmond wrapped up its first two-week summer practice session with a 7-on-7 scrimmage with Cape Fear Thursday afternoon. The team will not return to the practice fields until 10 a.m. July 6.
The Raiders will have another two weeks of practice until another dead period from July 20 to 24 because of the North Carolina Coaches Association Clinic in Greensboro.
There will be another four days of activities, then an off day before the official start of practice begins on Aug. 1.
According to the practice schedule, Castellano and his staff will have worked with the team for a total of 20 days before Aug. 1. Until the Millbrook scrimmage, the team will squeeze in another eight practices.
During all of these off days, Castellano said he hopes the leaders of the team will come forward and get the players organize for workouts on their own.
“The best case is the guys get together and they do some things together,” Castellano said. “The quarterbacks organize the receivers and the running backs throw and do those type of things. The defensive guys spend some time together, going through the calls and those kind of things.
“We try to focus on the positive. Hopefully, they get together and do the things that keep us on this path. We have goals and expectations and the only way to achieve them is to stay on the path we’re on.”
Assistant coach Steve Burdeau believes it will be good to give the team some time to recover from the first two weeks of practice, but quickly added the team, especially the offense, should continue to be moving forward in its preparations for the upcoming season.
“It will be nice to get a little break and get refreshed, but we also need to come back and continue learning and not necessarily regress,” Burdeau said. “We need to pick up where we just left off. We’ll review that stuff again that first day we get back. Ten days off is a little bit of time, but we need to make sure we haven’t lost anything.”
Castellano is staying positive and believes during the two dead periods this summer, the players will do the things it will take to end Richmond’s four-year conference championship drought.
“That’s the faith you got to have in your guys. You hope it means some thing to them which I think it does,” Castellano said. “Hopefully it means enough to them that they get together and they work hard and keep each other on the same page. That’s just having faith in your players and I think we have good kids. I think they’re good kids, I think they care, they work hard…I have faith they’ll do it.”
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