Football scrimmage exposes need for improvement

Scrimmage scores are not kept. The true purpose of the three-way football contests in Ramona last Thursday was experience and evaluation.

“It was a good work day,” said head coach Damon Baldwin. “Everybody got a lot of work and nobody got injured.”

The three-way practice included varsity, junior varsity and freshman teams from Ramona, Granite Hills and Mira Mesa.

Ramona’s first game of the season will be at home against St. Augustine on Friday, and Baldwin and his staff will work on eliminating the flaws exposed during the scrimmage.

“We’re working hard on correcting our mistakes,” Baldwin said. “We’re just trying to focus on getting better ourselves right now.”

St. Augustine has 19 returning starters. Ramona has four, including only one on offense. The lack of varsity experience was evident during the scrimmage.

“We made way too many mistakes, way too many penalties,” Baldwin said. “Not unexpected, but some of the stuff that we did was disappointing because it was stuff that we emphasized.”

What was the first varsity exposure for many of Ramona’s players came 15 days after the team’s first practice. On Jan. 21 the CIF Board of Managers unanimously approved a new bylaw limiting full-contact football practice to two days a week and no more than 90 minutes in one day.

“You’re unable to do much work during practices,” Baldwin said.

The scrimmage also served as an officials’ clinic, so more officials were on the field than normal. The positioning of the officials hindered Ramona’s traditional defensive alignment, which uses much of the backfield.

Whether the varsity scrimmage was successful for Ramona will depend on how the Bulldogs apply the lessons learned from what was functionally an interscholastic workout, but Baldwin was generally positive about the evening.

“We came out of the scrimmage healthy,” Baldwin said. “We’re just excited to get the season going.”