Football teams taking a page from the pros in the preseason

Before the start of last football season, Nashua High School North coach Jason Robie got a phone call from Ryan Ray, his counterpart at Manchester Central.

For the first time since North opened in 2004, the Titans wouldn’t be playing Central during the regular season and Ray had a proposal for Robie. Instead of the two teams scrimmaging during the preseason, Ray wanted to know if Robie would be interested in taking a day during camp and holding joint double sessions, with one practice in Nashua and the other in Manchester. At first, Robie wasn’t sure, but after some convincing from Ray, he agreed, and is glad he did.

“I was like I don’t know, but he sold me on how much more you really get done,” Robie said. “A lot of times when you go to a scrimmage, you’re trying to run as many plays as we can so we can teach the kids what they did wrong. If you line up in a scrimmage and you’re running the same play over and over again because it’s working, great, you would do that in a game. But you’ve got to find out all the things you do well.”

The two teams held another joint double session on Aug. 21, with the morning practice at Stellos Stadium and the afternoon session at Gill Stadium. Both coaches expect to continue doing it, even if they end up playing each other next season, with one exception.

“We’d love to do it again next year, obviously, if we opened up with them in Week 1 or Week 2, we would probably not be able to do this because tempers flare and things get carried over,” Ray said. “You don’t want guys to hear your calls. Or your walking down, coaching guys up and saying right in front of the other team, if he does this, you’re going to do that. You don’t want to give that away. If we were playing them in the middle of the season, I think we could still get something like this done.”

The idea came to Ray a few years ago, after seeing the New England Patriots hold a few days of preseason practices with teams they were eventually playing in an exhibition. The first year, the Little Green practiced with Trinity, but the difference in size between the programs proved to be difficult.

“You get a lot more work and a lot more reps,” Ray said. “You get a three or four hour halftime in between and the kids get to go home and have lunch and come back. Whatever you didn’t focus on in the morning, you get to focus on on the other side of the ball. As far as a double session day goes, it doesn’t get better.”

North and Central weren’t the only teams holding joint practices this season. Nashua South and Merrimack were scheduled to do the same last week, but a scheduling change with one of South’s scrimmages left it unable to participate, so Merrimack coach Dante Laurendi called up Bill Raycraft, the head coach at Windham, to gauge his interest. The two teams met for an afternoon practice, also on Aug. 21.

“I love the idea,” Raycraft said. “I’ll give Dante a call to see if we can do it again next year. You can only go against your own guys so many times, so it’s good to go against somebody and get them fired up and then you get fired up.

“It’s a lot more controlled, so we can gear it to what we want. A scrimmage you’re trying to get game-type situations in there. We were able to get some practice time in and bang a little bit and do some skill stuff.”

With Merrimack and Windham in different divisions, it was a chance for both teams to see an opponent they wouldn’t normally see, and not worry about situations that might come up in the regular season.

“This gives you the best of both worlds, where you can practice the different skills and techniques and positions, and then go to a live situation,” Laurendi said. “You’re still getting a live practice in.”

“We scripted it,” Robie said of the practice with Central. “We had 45 plays and we had all of our guys broken up into four groups and they all got reps. We weren’t concerned with winning a scrimmage. That’s what we’ll do when we go to Bedford (for a scrimmage on Saturday).”