There will be no spring football game this year for Boerne Champion, according to Chargers head coach Blane Ellis.
It’s the second year in a row for Champion to not have spring drills and Ellis said at this point, they’ll evaluate it year by year.
“It has served us well, and it’s been a good fit for our program, but we feel like this is what is best for us right now,” he said.
Champion began spring drills under former coach Keith Kaiser in 2013, and it continued under Ellis until 2024. A team is allowed 18 workouts in May, highlighted by the annual spring game near the end of the school year.
There were 11 Champion spring games from 2013 to 2024, but the Chargers didn’t have one in 2020 because of Covid, and they canceled last year’s workouts because they lost both their offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach going into the spring and weren’t sure what offensive schemes they would be using in the fall.
Ellis said he felt like not having it last spring really helped them last fall when they went three rounds deep into the playoffs and that’s what made him rethink the whole thing. The coach said there were other factors involved that made him decide to call off spring football, at least for now.
One factor was that several Charger football players also play baseball and the Champion baseball program has historically gone deep into the playoffs, which means baseball players can miss a lot of the spring drills, if not all of them. Even though baseball players can participate in spring football, most of them don’t, although some have done so in the past.
Another factor related to baseball is that some of the coaches were tied up with the playoffs, leaving Ellis shorthanded during football workouts at times.
“There were some challenges; I had quite a few practices over the years where I was the only defensive coach out there because you’re managing multi-sport athletes and multi-sport coaches,” he said. “If we had spring drills this year, we’d be missing four coaches and some players.”
Another reason for calling off the spring drills is because the UIL allows coaching staffs to do more in the offseason than they did in the past.
“There was a time when you couldn’t do any football-like drills in the offseason, but it’s different now,” he said. “Because we can do so much more during the offseason, a lot of schools are going away from spring football across the state.”
Schools that have spring drills have to delay their August workouts by a week, so varsity and JV teams can’t start until the second Monday of the month. Teams that have spring drills can only have one scrimmage, while those that don’t are allowed two scrimmages, and Ellis said they picked up another scrimmage against New Braunfels next August.
And while they didn’t have spring football last year and won’t this year, Ellis said he’s not opposed to bringing it back if it’ll help the program.
“We have a lot of guys coming back next year but the year after we may change our minds, it’ll depend on the year,” he said. “If we’re having to fill a lot of spots and if we’re dependent on sophomores, we may want to look at it. If we need it next year, we’ll sit and talk about it.”
In the 11 spring games played at Champion, the offense topped the defense eight times and won the last seven games using a modified scoring system.
Comment
Comments