Posted Monday, August 24, 2009 by Marc Allard

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It’s going to be an extra-long preseason for some local high school football teams.

The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference gave high school football coaches the option this season of either holding a 10-day spring football practice in June or start four days early this fall.

Killingly coach Chad Neal was one who elected not to get the footballs out in June and will be able to start the season on Wednesday with conditioning drills.

Neal said the option is especially good for small schools such as Killingly, which is hurt in the spring by its athletes playing other sports.

“We lose athletes there, and we also have to contend with our exam schedule and kids who hold jobs and can’t get time off in the spring,” Neal said.

You can add that in the spring, the seniors are no longer eligible and neither are incoming freshman.

Killingly also has a schedule issue as the first day of school for teachers, like Neal and his staff, is next Monday. The first day of school in Killingly is next Wednesday.

“We’re giving up six days, but these four days can make such a difference,” Neal said. “It gives us a chance to get all the paper work done and the physicals finished before school starts.”

Ledyard’s Jim Buonocore is a firm believer in spring football even though he lost 15 players, including two of his quarterbacks, to lacrosse last spring. He still had 45 players to work with.

“Coaches are set in their ways and spring football is part of the process; a chance to evaluate players like we do with our returning sophomores,” Buonocore said. “We like to get them up to speed with the practice tempo on the varsity level.”

Buonocore said the 10 practices were invaluable for his younger players especially the one quarterback he had available.

Another reason why Ledyard decided to go with spring over fall, it doesn’t play until Sept. 25.

“It’s fair and equitable,” said Buonocore, who sits on the CIAC football coaches committee, of the new rule. “It benefits the student-athlete who gets the maximum amount of coaching allowed in the spring or the extra time in the fall. Everyone is on an equal playing field.”

Bacon Academy’s Duane Maranda is a strong proponent of the extra fall practice instead of the spring. However, he opted to stay with spring ball?

“We had two reasons,” Maranda said. “We have a whole new coaching staff and it gave us two weeks to coach together and build relationships with the players. We also have a lot of new kids and it gave us a jump on the season.”

Maranda said the team has also re-worked its offense and installed a different defense; another sound reason to hold a practice in spring rather than in the fall.

The only problem I can see with the rule change for those who opted to use the extra time in fall is one that Maranda pointed out: Bordeom. It’s a long time between Wednesday and the first game of the season on Sept. 17.

Tough Love

Connecticut Defenders manager Steve Decker is not one to mince words.

Such was the case when asked last week about September call-ups and if anyone would be heading from Norwich to San Francisco come Sept. 1.

At first, Decker said the expected, which is that the organization controls those decisions and there are certain Defender players who might be worthy.

But then he stopped and thought.

“Are they mentally tough enough to go up there and compete? Some of our guys aren’t even tough enough to compete against Akron let alone the (Los Angeles) Dodgers or (Colorado) Rockies,” Decker said after a 6-4 loss to Akron on Tuesday.

Decker, in his fifth-year as a manager and first with Connecticut, has the team on course for a division championship.

“This is a funny time of year. This is the way it works; the mentally weak player will fail in the month of August because he’s scared to death of having a bad season. ‘Well, I was having a pretty good year and now I’m just giving it away,’ and the mentally tough player will keep on improving through the month of August. He won’t let the numbers fade away because he doesn’t have that programmed in his brain to worry about failing.

“That’s the difference between making a big leaguer who’s going to help you win a championship and the guy who is just a fill-in guy in the minor leagues. It’s tough to swallow and it’s tough for those guys to hear words like this, but it’s the honest-to-God truth.”

Words to fire up his team with, sure, but Decker said it doesn’t always work to tear through the clubhouse, slamming things down to motivate a club. Sometimes, in his mind, the truth must be told and the players must deal, not only with what their manager thinks, but with what their fans think.

“If (a fan) is sitting in the barber shop reading this; this is the reality,” Decker said. “I’m not going to lie. It is what it is, I’m going to tell truth,” Decker said.

Some players may have problems with that, while others such as Bobby Felmy, agreed with his manager.

“We should come out and play, that’s our job,” the outfielder said. “We only work five months out of the year, we should be able to give all we got for five months. It’s (Decker) wanting us to compete, wanting something better for us and the only way we’re going to do that is if we come out here every day wanting to play — hurt or not — he preaches that. I have never disagreed with that guy with anything he says.”

Chance meeting

How distant is the management and the product on the field in Double-A ball?

Consider this.

The owner of the Defenders, Lou DiBella, was in the Defenders clubhouse on Wednesday, 116 games into the season and had to introduce himself to Decker as the two had never met face-to-face before.