Madonna going back to basics during bye week
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WEIRTON -- For the players on the Madonna football team, this week will be a revisit of the offseason and the early part of the August training camp, as coach Darrin Hicks and his staff plans to concentrate a lot of the mandatory bye week time on strength training and conditioning, as well as fundamental football skills.
"The bye week allows us to heal up a little bit," said Hicks, whose 3-3 club was battered by a much bigger team in Clarksburg Notre Dame's 54-0 win on Saturday. "By this time in the season, we have guys with bumps and scrapes, and we've had a couple of guys out with more serious injuries for a couple of weeks.
"It allows us to get a little bit closer to full strength. I don't know that you're ever able to get back to full strength."
The practices during the course of the season are geared a lot more toward preparing a game plan for the upcoming opponent, so the bye week allows time to work on fundamentals.
"The week off will allow us to work on some things offensively, defensively and the kicking game," Hicks said. "That's something you always want to go back to, to make sure you're tight on your fundamentals. We have time set aside each day to work on fundamentals even on weeks when we have games, but it is not as much time as we'd like to have for those things that are really important."
Hicks said, looking back, that Notre Dame was a pretty good football team, regardless of the loss to winless South Harrison.
"Notre Dame had their bye week before last Saturday's game, so they had two weeks to prepare for us," he said. "South Harrison obviously did enough to beat Notre Dame, but I thought they did a nice job preparing for us. They have a nice club down there."
The win over Madonna vaulted Notre Dame to 16th in this week's Class A state rankings, while the Blue Dons slipped to 21. The Blue Dons sustained injuries to several key players, especially on the offensive and defensive lines.
"You want to control the line of scrimmage offensively and defensively, which we were never really able to establish anything in the run game or stop the run," Hicks said. "I think coach (Mike) Leach said it best when he was at Texas Tech. He said that he would always take an offensive lineman over a skill player when recruiting.
"That's really never left me. We don't get the opportunity to recruit here, but when you hear a guy of that stature, who has such a pedigree and innovative offense throwing the football, that tells you all you need to know. The idea being to control the line of scrimmage. The offensive and defensive lines are the unsung heroes of any successful program. It is definitely something you want to make a strong part of your team."
While Hicks said there will be no preparations for the upcoming homecoming game against Van on Oct. 13 at Jimmy Carey Stadium, he couldn't help but notice the Bulldogs are 12th this week in the state rankings with a 4-1 record. The only loss was a 60-0 defeat at the hands of Lincoln, a Class AA team with a 3-1 record.
"That puts us as going out of the frying pan into the fire," Hicks said with a chuckle. "Another highly ranked team will come into town, and it poses a great challenge for us."
Hicks added that this week, the coaches will still be looking at film, scouting and preparing the game plan for Van, but none of that will be introduced to the players until next week.
"We have a full plan set for us this week," Hicks said. "The big thing for us will be a lot of strength and conditioning. It's almost like an offseason week for us where we're going to be able to get four lifts and four conditioning sessions in this week, which will be really good for us for a lot of reasons.
"We'll kick back into that type of mode and cut down on the time we actually spend on the practice field. The sessions will be a lot more concentrated toward the skills we need to improve upon."