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Let's get physical: RHS football team wraps up hard-hitting spring

John Ritter is perfectly willing to accept—and even embrace—a little new-school style.

As long as it doesn’t mean sacrificing an ounce of old-school substance.

“We approach practice with a combination of both,” Ritter said on Saturday, just a few days after wrapping up his first spring as Russellville’s head football coach with an intrasquad scrimmage. “We do a lot of new-school fun things like playing music at practice. We practice at a really, really fast pace, and everything’s high-intensity. At the same time, though, we’re teaching the fundamentals. We’re teaching tackling. We had a very physical spring from the standpoint of, we taught them all how to be physical. We taught them all how to tackle.

“At the end of the day, kids like that. This is the only sport where you can be that kind of aggressive. Being physical and being rough is encouraged in football. In every other sport, there’s a penalty for it.”

Emphasizing and developing physicality without jeopardizing player safety is a major building block for Ritter, a former ASWA Coach of the Year at both Red Bay (2012) and West Morgan (2016) who was hired to take over the Golden Tiger program in March.

“It’s one thing to hit. It’s another thing to teach them how to hit,” Ritter said. “That’s one thing we really take a lot of pride in the way we practice. We’re gonna establish that physical brand of football, but we’re not out there just lining up and running into each other. Our goal is to teach them how to tackle and how to be physical the right way, so that we do protect ourselves.

“We tackled every day in practice for nine straight days, and we didn’t have one guy get hurt from tackling and hitting. We had one knee injury [to rising senior lineman Will Rushing, who suffered a torn meniscus on the first day of spring drills and had surgery last Friday that should only sideline him for a few weeks] that was kind of a freak thing, and we had a couple of rolled ankles here and there, but we had no injuries [that occurred] because of the physicality of our practices. We’re learning how to do it the right way, the safe way. I was really pleased with how our kids took to that—being physical on both sides of the ball and in every phase of the game, not just on offense and defense.”

If physicality (properly techniqued, but relentless) is one staple of Ritter’s coaching philosophy, a high level of enthusiasm is certainly another.

“I’m a firm believer that your assistant coaches feed off the head coach, and your kids are gonna take on the personality of their coaching staff,” Ritter said. “The personality we want to have is very intense, very enthusiastic, very positive, really getting after it. So we’re playing music at practice, jumping up and down, having a good time. But we also started to see a sense of rivalry develop between the offensive and defensive staff, and the kids feed off that.

“The longer we practiced, the more intense it became, the more we had kids calling on each other but also calling each other out when they didn’t do their jobs. You create a sense of accountability, and it all stems from that high-impact, high-intensity, get-after-it type of personality that I have and that our other coaches have as well.”

Ritter credits that kind of contagious enthusiasm and zeal for the game as a primary driving force for Russellville’s numbers this spring, which were through the roof.

“Counting five or six baseball players who either played last year or have expressed interest in playing this year, we started the spring with 106,” Ritter said. “We finished the spring with 96. We lost ten to attrition, which is not unusual, and we’ll probably lose ten or twelve more before the fall. That last scrimmage, we had five in baseball and seven guys that were injured and couldn’t play. I think we dressed 84, so that’s 96 kids who are gonna start the summer with us.

“I really don’t know why the numbers are up. Maybe after the first couple of days of practice, the kids were talking in the hallways about how much fun we were having.”

Ritter said that getting up to speed won’t be an issue for those players who missed the spring for one reason or another.

“That’s not a huge deal,” he said. “The way the summer is set up now and the way we practice in the summer, spring training is kind of overrated. We’ll have 21 workouts this summer, and we’ll practice 21 times. Those guys that didn’t participate in the spring, it’s not a big deal. We can catch them up really quick. We didn’t put a lot in offensively, mainly just our base stuff. For the most part we just wanted to line up and get after each other.

“Our goals this spring were to identify the guys who are gonna play hard, the guys who will strike and the guys who will be coachable. I think we accomplished all three of those goals.”

Under Ritter, Russellville will remain no-huddle on offense but will transition from wristbands to a signal-based system. He estimated the Golden Tigers got about a quarter of their new offense installed during the spring.

“We probably put in about 25 percent of the offense—just the really, really, really basic stuff,” Ritter said. “Our language and vernacular and how we call things are different. We put in three run plays, we put in one screen, two quick-game and two combinations on offense. We really just wanted to see who would play hard.

“Defensively, what we do is so simple [Ritter and defensive coordinator Chris Balentine have run an aggressive, slanting 3-4 scheme with great success at multiple schools], we were able to put the majority of it in. We worked as we went to get better at the little things.”

Those install efforts will increase this summer during the team’s Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday practice sessions. Ritter’s plan is for his team to be ready to hit the ground running when fall camp kicks off on August 6.

“Our goal is to be ready to practice and not do any install after that day,” said Ritter, whose team will host East Limestone for a preseason game on Friday, August 24. “We want to make sure that on that first Monday in August, when we start fall practice, we’re right where we need to be and we don’t have to play catch-up.”

The Golden Tigers’ first summer schedule under Ritter includes a trip to Samford on July 12 for a 7-on-7 competition, plus another camp at Russellville on July 26 that will feature 24 teams—all but two of which Ritter said will be local.

With spring drills in the rearview and the August 31 opener against Deshler looming on the horizon, Ritter emphasized the importance of June-July activities as the Golden Tigers aim to bounce back from last season’s 3-7 finish.

“I think it’s very important over the next two months for us to see who’s willing to sacrifice, to do what it takes to be successful,” Ritter said. “That’s what I told the guys. The next two months are all about getting better, getting bigger, faster and stronger, but also about being a good teammate—sacrificing a little bit of your summer so you can get better and be accountable to your teammates when fall practice starts.

“Like I told our guys, at the end of the day, we’re still Russellville. If we approach it like that—‘By George, we’re Russellville, and we’re not gonna be defeated’—we’ll have a great summer.”

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