With spring football scrapped, Colorado high school coaches make due amid coronavirus - The Denver Post

Jeremy Bennett already had enough to worry about this spring.

The 47-year-old took over the Mullen High School football program in February after serving as D’Evelyn High’s head coach for the past 15 years. He had new schemes to install, students walking the halls to recruit and a coaching staff to get acquainted with.

Doing all of that without the benefit of face-to-face contact has been far from ideal.

“It’s hard to have poetry in motion with 11 people if you don’t script it and go over it over and over,” Bennett lamented.

In a normal year, Colorado’s prep programs would be in the thick of spring football right about now. Many teams’ first practices would have started last week, with 10-day training sessions and team camps in pads and helmets scattered across the state.

Instead, coaches like Bennett have been forced to hold virtual sessions with their teams as in-person workouts are prohibited by the Colorado High School Activities Association through May due to the coronavirus pandemic. It will soon be up to local school districts to decide whether or not to extend that moratorium through the summer months. Many districts have tentatively pushed that back a startup to July 1, at the earliest, including Mullen in southwest Denver.

“I’ve tried to spin this as positive as possible,” Bennett said. “One of the things we tell (the players) is nobody will ever be able to take this away from us at Mullen High School. With a brand new staff and kids we had to push through the biggest adversity anyone in our generation has faced. And when we come out of the backside of this, we’re going to be stronger for it.”

(Kyle Newman, The Denver Post)

After spending 15 years as the head coach as D’Evelyn High School, Jeremy Bennett has been named the new head football coach at Mullen High School.

Of course, no program has been spared by the coronavirus crisis.

Even for someone like Columbine head coach Andy Lowry, who’s led the Rebels for the better part of three decades, there are plenty of obstacles and concerns. Among them is simply connecting with students.

“Kids need us, and that’s the hard part about it right now, is they need us more than they’ve ever needed us and we’re not able to be there in person,” Lowry said.

Added Bennett, “Yeah, we want to be playing football. Yeah, I want to be on the field doing those things. But I want our kids to be OK mentally. I want our kids to know that we’re there, and not just (for) football players. I think as educators and coaches we owe it to kids to make sure that mentally they are going to be OK.”

In some ways, it’s almost like going back in time for Lowry, who began his first head coaching job at Lakewood High in 1992.

Back then, there was no such thing as 7-on-7 football or spring practices, and team camp was still a few years from becoming an established part of the high school football experience.

“I think as coaches in our state, we have kept kids busy, and maybe too busy over the course of the summers over the course of the last 10 or 15 years,” Lowry said. “I’ve been around long enough to know when we used to start up in August and we didn’t have all this stuff in the summer and we were able to get our kids up and ready to go.”

That could be the challenge once again for high school coaches — if, of course, there’s actually a season to play.

CHSAA has yet to move any start dates for the 2020 fall sports season. Golf is set to tee off Aug. 3, with everything else scheduled to follow suit the next week. But CHSAA Commissioner Rhonda Blanford-Green has previously said “nothing is off table” in regards to returning high school athletics to play for the 2020-21 school year.

There have been promising developments, including Gov. Jared Polis recently saying he expects schools to re-open this fall. It’s likely things will look quite a bit different, however, and it doesn’t appear many coaches will be able to have in-person contact with athletes until July 1 at the earliest.

Jeffco Public Schools and Denver Publics Schools have prohibited in-person workouts between players and coaches until Aug. 1, but administrators for both districts acknowledged those dates could be moved up as conditions change.

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Columbine head coach Andy Lowry listens as Cherry Creek head coach Dave Logan speaks about the Columbine rushing attack during state high school football championships press conference at Empower Field at Mile High on Tuesday, December 3, 2019.

“I have confidence that we can get our kids ready in a couple weeks to go as long as they are doing all the physical activity on their own,” Lowry said. “When it comes to football and work with kids for any sport, coaches are pretty innovative on how they can do it.”

As for Bennett, he’s hoping those in charge at Mullen, a private Catholic school, will give their coaches and trainers the green light to start working with student-athletes sometime soon. It’s not just about installing a new system, but getting players ready for the rigors of a football season.

“You can’t go from 0 to 60,” he said. “How do you get ready to play football especially, but any sport, without being able to train your athletes? … Can you do it? If they are physically fit. If not, I’ve got some safety concerns.”

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