It’s hard to prepare for a middle school football season very far in advance. Just ask Republic 8th grade coach Joe Brown.
“You don’t know what you’ve got until they show up,” he says.
This year, what showed up is one of the most intelligent football teams he’s coached.
“I’d say the strength of our team is we are a very smart team. We don’t have the big, huge, physical offensive linemen. I don’t have the speedsters, but we’ve got good talent,” he says. “I’m running things we’ve never run before.”
Brown says this season, more than ever, his team will resemble the high school teams at Republic. That’s largely because his players are picking up concepts faster than most 8th grade players.
“We’ll run a lot of the high school stuff that we haven’t in the past. We’re trying to make it easier for the junior high kids to understand and make it useable for them,” Brown says.
In a season that lasts only about a month and a half, there’s a lot of learning to do in a short amount of time. One focus of Brown and his staff will be physicality.
“As a group, we have to get a whole lot more physical. We preach that every single day,” he says. “It’s hard to teach. I’ve got kids who just turned 13. Some mature sooner. It’s hard as a coach when their bodies haven’t developed and they don’t know what it means to be more physical.”
Brown says his team’s good “football sense” will allow the coaching staff to be more flexible with play calling, even signaling in new plays from the sideline at times and letting players adjust.
“They know what’s going on. They pick it up and expand on it and take it farther than we ever thought we could,” Brown says.
The Tigers open their season on the road Thursday night at Lebanon.
