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Youthful Spiders face challenge

cNew coach, new staff likely to find out where team stands early in season

Photo by Marty Price

Concord High School football coach Glen Padgett calls an offensive play as his team scrimmages at West Charlotte in Charlotte, NC.

By Steve Winzenread | Independent Tribune

Published: August 21, 2009

CONCORD - A new head coach and a youthful team. That's the situation for Concord football this season.

"We've going to be a very, very young football team," Spiders coach Glen Padgett said.

"We've got a lot of juniors and a lot of sophomores playing. Some of them started last year; some of them played on the jayvee."

In his first season as the Spiders' head coach, Padgett will find out quickly where his team stands.

"That's going to be a challenge, because our first two games especially, we open up with Marvin Ridge, who beat Concord 38-0 last year and has a lot of people back and is being picked by some people to be in the top 10 in the state," Padgett said.

"And then we play Lexington, who has a lot of returning starters back. They got to the quarterfinals in 2A last year. Their quarterback is one of the best athletes in the state. He's got a number of ACC schools looking at him.

"So you take a young team and you open with two very, very good opponents. We're going to find out where we are quickly. That's exciting. I see that as opportunity. It's a challenge, but a challenge is an opportunity.

"That's the way we've chosen to focus on it this year and focus on throughout the summer. ... I don't think our players are focused on us being a young team. They want to be a winning team; that's what matters to them."

Two familiar names were preseason frontrunners to play quarterback for CHS.

"Right now we've got two young men that are playing quarterback," Padgett said. "Both played a lot last year. Sean Willix and Jordan Havinga. Right now they're in a dead heat. If we were to start today, they'd both get equal playing time.

"As a coach, from a convenience standpoint, you almost want one to step ahead of the other so that it doesn't create a revolving door situation, but when you've got two kids that are in a virtual dead heat, we're going to do different things with each of them because each of them does different things well.

"Each of them has certain weaknesses and certain strengths, and we're going to tailor ourselves to those things.

"And we've got some other situations where we're going to put some other people there in plays out of those sets to create matchup issues."

One of the main tasks this summer was figuring out who to play where.

"That's been the challenge of the summer," Padgett said. "That's one of the things that we told our players. Number one, with us being young, and number two, being a new staff, I can only go on what I've seen from tape of last year.

"Going into the summer, I kind of had an idea on some players and positions, we did, but our defensive philosophy has changed a little bit. Not so much the philosophy, but the scheme. So we've moved some people around because of that.

"A lot of the summer was to ascertain what was the best position for the players to optimize our team on defense, our team on offense. And we got some good ideas. We're still playing around with a couple of different scenarios and positions, but we are probably, I would say, 80 percent there."

On defense, Padgett said, "We're going to be a little more stunt-oriented, We're going to run a stack 3-3, which is something that we've had a lot of success with over the last five years.

"It's a defense that's fun for players. It takes away a lot of the read responsibilities but it doesn't take away gap responsibilities. We call it a high-risk but high-reward kind of defense. You can give up big plays, but you can also create turnovers and you can create big plays off the stunts that you do.

"And in high school football, turnovers are the key to any game. If you look at statistics, special teams and turnovers are the things that win ballgames because there's where most of your big plays are. I think our players here have bought into it and they're excited about it, and that's also something we need to do based on our personnel because of the number of kids we've got in certain positions. This defense is more advantageous to the type of players we have."

Padgett likes his offense to be multiple.

"We like to do a lot of things," he said. "We'll run one-back, some I and some split-back misdirection I ran at Northwest (Cabarrus) from 1999 through 2002.

"We have two very young but very talented running backs, I think. If the offensive line gels ... we lost four of five starters on the line.

"We'll mix pass and run and try to keep people off-balance. That's been our philosophy the last 10 or 12 years and that's not going to change.

"What will change is what our kids do well here may be different than what we had at North (Mecklenburg) or Northwest, so we've got to adapt to their talents."