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Home > Blogs > Springfield, Ohio High School Sports > Archives > 2009 > August > 04 > Entry
Training Camp Insider: Triad
Payton Printz gives his Triad football players popsicle breaks almost every day. To be more exact, they are Freeze Pops, and the Cardinals scored big points with this sports writer when one of the players offered me one Tuesday morning.
He offered me a green one. Then he offered me an orange one. Then he said to take both. I took only the orange one in the end.
A few of the players worried that it wouldn’t look as if they were working if I filmed them eating Freeze Pops, but rest assured, Triad is working as hard as anyone.
The Cardinals are coming off a 7-3 season that saw them lose to the Ohio Heritage Conference’s top three teams by eight points or less (14-6 at West Liberty-Salem; 25-17 to Catholic Central; and 35-28 to Mechanicsburg).
The 2008 season marked a big step back after a 1-9 record in 2007.
Their success in 2008 can be attributed in part to the installation of a new spread offense. Triad lit up the scoreboard, especially in their first four games, all wins, in which they averaged 46 points per game.
Triad lost its two biggest weapons to graduation: quarterback Ethan James and wide receiver Austin Dixon. But coach Payton Printz is sticking to the spread, and his players are confident after a year of running the offense.
“Our staff, last year we didn’t know what we were doing, I’ll be honest with you,” Printz said. “It was new to us. We were learning as the season went on. A lot of the mistakes we made last year, we hope to not make this year. We know we’re going to make new ones, but hopefully those mistakes from last year will be fixed. I think we’ve fixed them.”
Here are some other interesting tidbits I picked up on Tuesday:
Printz said someone is making new goalposts for the football field. The uprights on the current ones are shorter than most and are rusting. This should help the team’s talented kicker, Daniel Kaffenbarger. Printz said he’s capable of hitting from 50 yards.
The team has a freshman named Derick Bird, who plays with a prosthetic leg. Printz said he’s a great kid who’s amazing to watch, and he said he will get on the field this year. He has an identical twin brother on the team.
Senior linebacker Gregg Reed has written a book, a coming-of-age novel that he hopes to get published. He said he’s worked on it for more than two years.
One of Printz’s assistant coaches joked that Printz gets more text messages than a teen-aged girl, and many of them are from former players. Printz keeps in touch with many former players and is especially proud of the ones who are in the military. One of those players, a Navy Seal, has given the team Seal workouts to follow in practice.
Every year before the season, the team goes to see a movie together. Last year, it was The Dark Knight. This year, they saw Aliens in the Attic in Marysville on Saturday. The players thought it was a movie more suited to a younger crowd.
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