Andrews and Murphy football programs continue to prepare for postponed season
During a normal year, elecricity would be crackling through the valley this fall as the Andrews Wildcats and Murphy Bulldogs prepared for their opening games of the high school football season.
But this fall, the two football stadiums in Cherokee County and the entire state of North Carolina, along with many others, will sit empty on Friday evenings due to postponements of the football season caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
With more than five months until the new Feb. 8 start date for football practices chosen by the N.C. High School Athletics Association, coaches and players now have to figure out how to pace themselves in preparation for a season that is nearly half of a year away.
“I was thinking I better get my snow gear out,” Andrews coach James Phillips said of the new start date for “fall” football. “But it’s good to at least have a date locked down and some sort of a schedule.”
“The big point of discussion between the coaching staff this week at Andrews has been, what are workouts going to look like now,” Phillips continued. “Really right now the big thing for me and our coaches is to continue to push our athletes with their strength and conditioning along with some speed work and mix in some football skill development stuff.”
Down at Murphy High School, which had previously canceled workouts for two weeks because of COVID-19 concerns and a mandatory NCHSAA dead period during the opening week of the school year, fall football workouts will look like much of the same.
“We’re looking at this like summer-time workouts with the infusion of more weights hopefully, that’s basically what we’ll be doing,” Murphy coach David Gentry said of the Bulldogs’ extended offseason plans.
“It depends on what phase we’re in. Right now we’re in Phase Two, and you can only go for 90 minutes, you can only have 10 people in the weight room at a time. So we’re limited in what we’re doing time-wise and where we can go to work out.”
Gentry said that he’d like to get as much on-field work done in the next few months as possible before the temperatures start to decline, then pivot to more weight-lifting-centric workouts during the winter months.
“Everything we’ve done has been weird so far, so I think this just falls in line with that,” Gentry said of a fall without “Friday Night Lights. "All of us long for the time where we could have a normal week with a normal Friday night.”