Year two of the Bobby Bass era got started last week at Newton County.
The Cougar concluded their first week of Bass’ second season with a Saturday morning scrimmage.
“Overall, I thought the first week went well,” Bass said. “One thing we have to work on is consistency with our effort. The heat beat us down and I’m sure it beat a lot of people down. We have to be mentally tough and fight through that. We got a lot done. We haven’t changed a whole lot, just trying to get better at what we do.”
Bass said he was pleased with the play of the defensive line, especially against the play of a much bigger offensive front.
“I think our defensive line is coming along and getting off the ball,” Bass said. “They are holding their own against a much bigger offensive line. We are giving them problems on offensive with how fast they are. But this time you year, you expect the defense to be ahead. We don’t do a lot of thinking on defense, just executing.”
Bass did say the Cougars needed to clean up the standard first- scrimmage kind of mistakes, such as jumping off side and ball security.
“You can always talk about ball security this time of year,” Bass said. “We had some bad snaps and we have to clean that up. We are still trying to figure out if we are a shotgun team or an under center team. We have both of them in. We are just trying to figure out what we are going to be good at and do that.”
The Cougars will host a six-team jamboree on Friday night and take on Lake in the final game, which is set for 8 p.m. Last year, the Cougars beat Lake 7-0 in the jamboree.
“This week, we will still do a lot of work on ourselves,” Bass said. “We are not going to game plan for Lake. We will just focus on ourselves and do what we do. We have to do a better job of tackling in space and pursuing the ball. I thought we got a little tired on Saturday and we have got to work on that. After watching film, there are a lot of little things we need to get better on like pad level and things like that. We need to learn to watch film and learn from it instead of watching it for highlight clips.”
Newton County will open the season at Leake Central on Aug. 23.
