It’s been a frustrating fall for many high school football players around Massachusetts, one unlike any other.
With football on hold until the Fall II season that begins in February, players at Franklin Tech have been itching to get back out on the field with their pads on. They’ve been forced to be patient. For some who grew up playing the game, it’s the first fall they haven’t played competitive football since elementary school.
To keep the team together and active, the Eagles have been practicing twice a week, doing mostly conditioning and some skill work while installing some of the playbook. Though not the same as a normal practice during the season, the team feels it has made progress and steadily improved throughout the fall sessions.
“We’re getting some good practices in,” senior Andrew Shaw said. “Everyone is getting good reps. It’s going well. All of us just want to get better so when we go into the season, we can play the best that we can. Nobody is going to be put out there out of nowhere when the season starts because we’ve had this time to get better.”
It’s been difficult for area football teams to get too much work in during limited time practice every week, and without helmets and pads, the workouts don’t resemble what practices would look like during the season.
To combat that, the Eagle players are focusing on improving where they can.
“It’s really helped us build our team chemistry a lot,” senior Owen Bashaw said. “We get a lot more time together.”
For a program like Franklin Tech, which ended its 2019 season on a high note with a 30-0 drubbing of Smith Vocational on Turkey Day, the wait to get back out there hasn’t been easy. The Eagles were hoping to build on the momentum they gained late last year.
Seeing a turnout of about 25 players at each fall practice has been encouraging. Dylan Demers echoed Bashaw’s feeling that team chemistry has grown exponentially.
“It’s getting kids that wouldn’t be playing a sport right now time to get in a workout instead of just sitting at home doing nothing,” Demers said. “It gives them a feel for what the team is like and how it’s going to be run in the winter time. It’s getting them used to what’s going to happen.”
With the uncertainty of a season actually being played, it’s been important for seniors like Demers, Bashaw and Shaw to make sure all the hard work they’ve put into growing the program is passed down to the next generation of freshmen, who have shown up in good numbers to the fall practices.
Drawing from their own experiences, they’ve been able to get their new teammates up to speed on how the program operates.
“We get to show them what it’s like here,” Demers said. “We get to show them how to carry on the tradition of the team after we’re gone. That’s what we need out of these young guys, to put in the work because that’s where it starts. That’s where we started, we worked hard in the beginning and got to where we are now. Kids are learning some basic plays and learning each other and figuring out how we work together. Hopefully by the time the season comes around, we already know each other, we know how each other play and we should be able to hop right into it.”
Thursday’s practice marked the final time Franklin Tech will gather on the field before the Fall II season is expected to start in a few months. For now, the players, and especially the seniors, will have to wait and see what happens with the football season, holding out hope that they’ll be able to suit up and have a final slate of games with their teammates.
“This could be our last time out on the field,” Demers said. “We might not even be able to play in the winter season, which would suck. We don’t take what we have here for granted and we’re working with what we’ve got. Football is my favorite sport. It’s the sport I look forward to every year. Being able to get on the field, play and hit people and not get in trouble for hitting people has been tough. I miss it a lot. It sucks and I wish we were out here playing but there’s not much we can do about it right now.”