King’s, Wilkes football teams dealing with canceled spring practices

WILKES-BARRE – Saturday was scheduled to be a big day in State College.

The annual Blue-White Game, which typical draws more than 60,000 Penn State football fans, was scheduled to be played. But the annual game along with the team’s spring practice sessions were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

King’s College and Wilkes University’s teams are dealing with their own issues as the two school’s spring football practices were also canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Spring practice is one of the most vital parts of the offseason for colleges. It gives teams an opportunity to get onto the field and focus on improving techniques, conditioning and knowledge of the playbook.

“As a young football team, we could’ve used that development time in the spring, but it also helps mold your team culture,” Wilkes Coach Jonathan Drach said. “Now we are going to have to rely on our leaders as we come into camp. So for our juniors and seniors and guys that have been through a season before hopefully they continue to work as if we had spring ball. The goal is that when we come in that everyone is firing on all cylinders and that they have done the work earlier in the offseason to put themselves in a position to be successful.”

Across all levels of college football, this hurts every program because not only do these players not get onto the field, but they also miss out on team workouts. And the longer gyms stay closed, players are unable to do a big part of their strength programs.

“It hurts because we are losing basically a quarter of the offseason,” King’s Coach Jeff Knarr said. “They were in the weight room, and our kids were working hard there but now they are trying to do body weight/resistance type workouts like running. It is better than nothing, but it isn’t what we were doing.”

For the high-budget Division I programs, they have more opportunities to make sure its players are doing more work by tracking workouts through apple watches.

For local Division III programs like Wilkes and King’s, they have more obstacles to climb. Division III players don’t get the luxury like those at Alabama, but they are still expected to do everything they can to make the best of the situation.

“The biggest thing we are trying to do is keep up with our install schedule and give our guys individual workouts, drill oriented work toward the install that we are doing,” Drach said. “Hopefully the guys are able to do as much of the stuff individually as they can. They are still getting to work on their skill set, they’re still learning our schemes and they are doing everything that they can to try and continue growing their knowledge as far as football goes.”

Football programs across the country are doing whatever they can to make up for the 16 practices and countless hours of meetings and lifts lost to this pandemic.

“We have met with our guys positionally through the Microsoft video meetings to go over our schemes, techniques and fundamentals and try to not just become a better football player, but a smarter football player,” Knarr said. “It is disappointing for the young guys to not get on the field to get a chance to show what they can do, but this is why we are doing the video meetings so they can get to understand what they are seeing and what the techniques are so we can make them smarter.”