ROCHESTER – The accolades rained down on the Rochester High School football team last fall.
Ethan Rodriguez was Evergreen League MVP. Wyatt Dahl earned the Lineman of the Year award. The Warriors had 10 players on the all-league first team. Even AJ Easley and his staff was named as the league's staff of the year.
Just don’t expect the Warriors to hold on too long to those honors.
“Our motto has been to raise the standard,” Easley said. “What we did last year is done and it was great, but it wasn’t good enough.”
Rochester opened the second week of fall camp with another two-a-day practice, ending with a 105-minute session that featured plenty of the traditional power run plays this offense is accustomed to.
Here were three takeaways from the Warriors’ Monday night practice.
Numbers are up… by a lot
Since Easley took over a handful of years ago, Rochester has averaged around the 40s in varsity numbers. A lot more blue practice jerseys were donned this year.
It has roughly 65 players in the program. Individual drills were more than double digits per defensive positional group.
“It is thrilling,” Rodriguez said. “Knowing that there are kids that want to play at this school and continue a legacy, it feels great.”
“It’s not rocket surgery”
There was an instance during team offense where Easley’s fun bucket was filling up fast. Whether it was not running past 10 yards after splitting the gap or jogging back to the line of scrimmage, he was over it.
So he had the two offensive units do a series of up-downs before restarting. He proclaimed nothing they were doing was “rocket surgery.”
“Kind of a blip,” Easley added. “Guys getting tired a little bit. That’s probably the first time that I’ve had to get after them to get moving a little bit.”
Plenty of size in the trenches
It’s not just Dahl that returns on the offensive line. A pair of first team all-league honorees Stanton Smith and Jackson Allman are back plus three other linemen sit at over 300 pounds and two of them are over 6-foot.
Both Easley and Dahl feel it is one of the strongest lines they’ve seen over the last four years in the program.
“We got a good group, everybody is bought in,” Dahl said.
