MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Without a defensive coordinator for most of the summer, the University High football team got its first taste of another offense besides its own Friday night in a scrimmage against Keyser at Mylan Pharmaceuticals Stadium.
The new man running the show defensively is Jake Myers, who replaces Eric Snyder under head coach John Kelley. With a play sheet clipped to his belt and a booming voice from the UHS sideline, Myers wanted to see what his defense is all about.
And like most scrimmages in preseason camp, there was some good and a lot of bad. The Golden Tornado will likely be one of the best teams in Class AA this season and has the size to prove it. UHS, on the other hand, is breaking in a young squad full of underclassmen who are 14 and 15 years old.
The Hawks were able to get into the backfield at the snap, but failed to wrap up and bring Keyser down when they had the opportunity. Missed tackles caused big plays in the running game, and UHS struggled to cover passes in the flat on rollouts by the quarterback.
In the end, the Golden Tornado finished with a 21-0 win, with each team getting 10 plays on offense per series.
But to Kelley, the most disappointing part was running out of gas physically and running out of heart emotionally.
With such a young team, toeing the line between coaching a player hard and not crushing confidence is one of the most difficult aspects of teaching at this level.
“You have to be very careful — you can’t brow beat them and you can’t expect them to perform well against a veteran team like that,” Kelley said. “I can’t expect them to do well against a team full of two-year starters and you can’t expect them to be super, but they have to learn and they have to toughen up. They have to go through their wars, get their rear end kicked a few times, and decide whether or not they want to toughen up.”
With this being his first year with the program, Myers believes the easiest way to teach a young group is to just keep things simple.
“We want our guys to play as hard and as fast and they can with little amount of thinking,” he said. “That’s what we try to build our scheme around – guys just flying to the ball, getting to the quarterback and getting to ball carriers.”
Myers spent last season as an assistant coach for East Fairmont, but coached in the college ranks in the early part of his career. After playing at Mansfield College in Pennsylvania, where current UHS offensive coordinator Shane Ziats was the offensive line coach, Myers became a defensive backs coach at his alma mater. Three years later, he became an assistant at Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pa., which is well known at WVU for providing the Mountaineers with Kevin White, Ka’Raun White, Kyzir White and Trevon Wesco.
Despite the lumps he knows his squad will take this season, Myers is “excited to be here” and wants to help the young Hawks take the next step.
UHS will scrimmage Aug. 23 at Preston before opening the regular season Aug. 30, hosting John Marshall.
