Greenback football working hard during summer

The Pratt High Greenback football team is doing plenty of conditioning this summer to ensure they will be ready when they take the field in the first game of the season.

In year’s past, that meant weightlifting early and often and leaving the footballs at home – until now. KSHSAA has changed the rules, allowing head coach Jeff Fuss some wiggle room to do some football specific drills and practices.

The rule change allows Fuss and any other Kansas high school coach to do basically whatever they want from Memorial Day until today. Starting next week, they are restricted to typical, non-football specific conditioning.

“After the 16^th, we can no longer practice or have footballs,” Fuss said. “We have a good month and a half where we just lift and condition.”

The extra practice time in June was spent wisely by Fuss. He held his football camp the first week of June and built upon the foundations set there. At the end of the week, he took the team to Hutchinson to scrimmage with other 4A teams, as well as 5A and 6A teams like Wichita’s Bishop Carroll and Salina South.

“On Sunday, we took our varsity kids to Hutch Community College and scrimmaged with some other schools up there,” Fuss said. “It was basically all 4A, 5A and 6A schools. It was a good experience for us.”

Fuss described the week as eight days of very intense football, something he says allows the coaches to see strengths and weaknesses at every position and tailor the rest of June to work on things.

Despite getting all the extra time to work with kids on football specific drills and conditioning, Fuss knows how easy it can be to burn kids out. He was quick to point out that nothing over the summer is forced on the kids, and that they want to be there because they want to be a good team once the season starts.

“Nothing we do during the summer is construed as mandatory,” he said. “But our kids are smart, and they know that they can’t afford to miss much of this because everybody in the state is doing these things as well.”

While it may seem like a grueling schedule to get together each morning at 7 a.m. to lift weights and work on things, the kids have some leniency to miss things when they have other commitments. Fuss said he wants his kids to take vacations with their families and enjoy their summer – he just wants them to be in shape for football too.

“We don’t punish kids for not being in the weight room,” he said. “However, if they’re in town, we expect them to be there.”

Now that the opportunity to practice has come and gone, Fuss will go back to normal conditioning and agility workouts, allowing his players to take the next month or so to focus on things other than football. He calls his program High Intensity, and it will add to the usual weightlifting sessions they’ve had so far this summer.

“We’ll get together at 6 a.m. and lift and then after go into the gym and do some agility and footwork stuff,” he said. “Those are things that we can do as conditioning that’s not football related.”