Kennesaw State’s football team won’t play its first game for another year, but coach Brian Bohannon said the work he and his staff will do this fall will set the tone for the program for years to come.
The beginnings of how they practice for that inaugural opener against East Tennessee State on Sept. 3, 2015, to how they perform in the classroom and interact socially with other students will start when the players report for their first practice Aug. 18. Bohannon expects to have around 100 players in for the first fall camp.
“This is a huge foundation time to build on who we want to be as a program 15-20 years from now,” Bohannon said. “That’s why we talked so much about this first class and how important they are.”
Taylor Henkle, one of the signees, spoke like a veteran when asked how they can take advantage of a year of free football.
“We take each practice as a day to get better,” he said. “We don’t look ahead. We know that we are all incoming freshmen trying to start a football program. We know there will be ups and downs, but we have a year to get ready to play in the Big South.”
Bohannon and his staff spent a lot of time working out exactly what they were going to do this year and what they wanted to do.
They visited Charlotte, which also recently started football, and talked with coaches at recent start-ups Old Dominion and South Alabama about their approaches to a “redshirt” season.
This is their plan:
The first two weeks will be spent on conditioning, followed one week of weightlifting.
The next three weeks, starting Sept. 8, will be devoted to practice, including film work as they study the schemes on offense, defense and special teams, which will also help the coaches figure out what they will need in the next recruiting class, one that Bohannon expects will include several transfers and a lot of focus on the offensive line.
The Owls will have another week of weightlifting and conditioning followed by three more weeks of practice.
At the end of the first week, on Oct. 11, they will scrimmage.
Bohannon said the scrimmage will be one of the ways in which they will break up the monotony and will give the fans a chance to see what some of them have been waiting more 10 years to see.
“That is something they will look forward to,” Bohannon said. “We will divide them up and they will get to play in front of some people.”
Waiting to actually get to play may be the hardest thing to, particularly when most of the FBS and FCS teams will be going at it every week.
“We know our time will come and we will be prepared when we start playing,” Henkle said.
The schedule will continue with the same pattern for the rest of the season.
“We talk about win the day on the field, win the day off the field, win the day in the classroom,” Bohannon said. “Habits that are being created are the things that will be around for a long time. It’s a great developmental year.”
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