Red/White scrimmage opens Tipp football preseason slate
While the Tippecanoe football team finally got to line up against some unfamiliar faces on Saturday when they traveled to scrimmage Beavercreek and Alter. They first enjoyed their annual Red/White scrimmage at the stadium where parents and fans had the chance to get a sneak peek at this year’s edition of the Red Devils.
“This is the best conditioning we can do,” Burgbacher said. “You can run sprints, but let’s go play football and play it at a very high level. We are teammates at the end of the day, but we are out here competing, and our guys did a great job competing.”
“Were we perfect today? No…but we were perfect in our effort. Our kids played hard. Those are things that are tough to coach. When you have a team that is going to play hard, we saw a lot of good things. We saw a lot of things we are going to have to fix. We don’t want to go into Saturday or even week one and not know where these weaknesses are.”
“The nice thing about this scrimmage is that we are able to strategically place certain guys somewhere because we have a lot of guys competing for jobs. We have some young guys out there where we can see how you are going to respond when you are going up against an all-state senior tackle.”
The scrimmage opened with one of the question marks for the Tipp squad this year, their kicking and the injury to Owen Baileys.
“Owen has been out all summer with an injury, and (sophomore) Kellen Sellers is doing a great job,” Burgbacher said. “He has been very impressive with the work that he has put in and everything that you want to see. We have some other young guys also working hard at it. It is a very popular position around here right now. We are in great hands, and I am not losing any sleep over our kicking situation.”
One of the biggest things taken out of the scrimmage was the effort put in on both sides of the line. The defense stepped up and worked very hard against a very potent offense that Tipp possesses.
“I thought our defense flew to the football,” Burgbacher said, noting they will also have to fix some tackling issues. “It is day two of practice, but again those things that are hard to coach (effort), we are not going to have to coach that.”
Getting up to game speed is something that Burgbacher and his staff will continue to work on with the guys as they head toward the August 21 opener against Bellbrook.
“We are a gap responsibility team, so they have to have that discipline of being where you are supposed to be when you are supposed to be there,” the Tipp coach said. “That will come with time.”
Tipp also used a great scrimmage on Saturday, traveling to play Beavercreek and Alter, and Burgbacher felt it was a great chance for Tipp to continue to improve.
“We saw two offenses that we are not going to see throughout the season,” he said. “But I love the offense that Alter runs. They are going to come right at you and we got to see how our defense responds. Beavercreek’s defense is also very aggressive, and that scrimmage was playoff football.”
Tipp returns to the field this Friday night, hosting Anna in their final scrimmage with kickoff at 7 p.m. The Rockets are one of the favorites to compete for the Ohio Division 6 state championship.
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