HAMPDEN — Jon Haws remembers the early days of his football career, when summer workouts in anticipation of the autumn to come would consist of running, lifting weights, and pickup passing drills on the weekend with his buddies.
Then preseason practices began, and in many respects it was like starting from scratch.
But for Haws and hundreds of high school football players around the state, that regimen has changed dramatically in recent years with the introduction of seven-on-seven summer football programs that focus on passing offense and passing defense.
“It’s completely beneficial to whoever comes out and plays,” said Haws, who will be a senior quarterback at Hampden Academy this fall. “Everyone likes it, it’s just a good time to come out and play football.”
This summer alone, more than 30 of the 74 varsity football-playing high schools in the state were represented in seven-on-seven leagues hosted by Hampden Academy, Leavitt of Turner Center and by several Greater Portland schools.
“You can go out and the kids can work on all the different routes and throwing and catching the ball as well as play pass defense on a field altogether,” said John Bapst of Bangor coach Dan O’Connell. “There’s nothing like competition, live reads, live adjustments, kids making plays, all those things that you get in the other sports in the summer because they have competitions while we’re not going out and playing whole football games. They’re getting a chance to compete in a ‘game’ situation now, too, and that’s how they get better in this particular event.
“For football, seven-on-seven at least gives us that game feel that raises the intensity and makes you want to make plays and get after it a little bit even though there’s no blocking and tackling. There’s a game feel to it and I think that’s a huge plus.”
That’s especially true for football players and coaches given that seven-on-seven football hasn’t really replaced anything since it was introduced in Maine several years ago but has become an additional — and valuable — asset in the pursuit of state championship glory each fall.
“Before this the most we ever did was if we had enough players lifting and it worked out skill-position wise we might go out and play a game of two-hand touch,” said Mattanawcook Academy of Lincoln coach Dave Hainer. “But it wasn’t as organized as this, and often we didn’t have enough kids or enough kids at the right positions to do this.
“We’d only be able to do it once every couple of weeks. Now we know we can come [to Hampden] each week and put in our offense for the fall, basically.”
Not backyard football
Seven-on-seven touch football is played without the linemen that are an integral part of the traditional 11-man version of the game.
As a result, there is no running and instead a focus on passing offense and pass defense.
Two games typically take place simultaneously in opposite directions on a 100-yard football field, with each game using 40 yards.
In some games each offense has the ball for a predetermined amount of time, while in other scenarios teams can earn first downs by gaining sufficient yardage through the air.
The quarterback usually is given four seconds to release the football, an effort to approximate the amount of time he might have before becoming the victim of a pass rush.
“From what I’ve experienced in seven-on-seven it’s pretty realistic whether you’re on offense or defense,” said Haws. “I get to see the holes and how our offense reacts to their defense and how their defense reacts to our offense. We get to see where those holes are and who’s going to stand up and make plays.”
And while seven-on-seven may not be an exact replica of what’s to come in the fall, it does help both players and coaches get a head start.
“I think you get a lot of reps on both sides of the ball,” said Leavitt coach Mike Hathaway, whose program hosts a 12-school seven-on-seven league. “We figured we got 300 snaps on both sides of the ball in the pass game each summer, maybe even more than that. It’s just good to get your kids out there.
“I think it’s tough to get kids to come out and just run on the track or do sprints, but when they know they’re going to come out and play football and do something competitive they like that.
Not only are there plenty of repetitions, but teams generally run most of the plays and formations they will run during the regular season.
“We run our playbook,” said Hainer. “Our passing game is put in during the summer, really. We don’t call plays any differently in seven-on-seven, and we don’t call any backyard football plays. It’s our passing tree, we have a combination of plays and guys learn to cut off each other and get their timing and the quarterback learns the timing of the receivers.”
And while seven-on-seven is considered a passing formation, great importance also is placed on defending against the pass and building both the physical skills and mental acuity of the linebackers, cornerbacks and safeties.
“A lot of teams in the fall still are going to run primarily run offenses, so some coaches say why do I want to do seven on seven?” said Bonny Eagle of Standish coach Kevin Cooper. “It helps us at Bonny Eagle as much on the defensive side of the ball as it does on the offensive side of the ball. We can’t expect to stop the spread offense that Windham runs or that Deering [of Portland] runs if the first time we’re practicing against it is that game week in the fall. We need to be able play pass defense, and seven-on-seven helps just as much on defense as it does on offense.”
Coaches also can take a look at younger players who may vie for varsity playing time for the first time once preseason practices begin, and get a first glimpse at how those hopefuls react under game-related pressure.
“When you go out and work on your skills as an individual team, every receiver runs a slant route, every quarterback throws 15 slants and it’s like clockwork,” said O’Connell. “But here you see when you get in a game situation those intangibles in a kid. When you put him in a game situation you see his maturity, his mental toughness, and often that’s what is going to determine if he is going to be successful in a game.”
Then there are those veteran players seeking to adapt to new positions, like Mattanawcook senior Nolan Pelkey, who plans to shift from linebacker to defensive end for the Lynx this fall.
“I think it’s really beneficial because it lets me see the plays and get my reads down, and I get a chance to read the quarterback’s eyes because he doesn’t have a helmet on and then I see where the ball is going,” said Pelkey.
“If it wasn’t for this I’d have to do it all on my own.”
Pelkey has just one regret about seven-on-seven football.
“It’s a little different because I can’t hit the first guy I see,” he said. “I have to hold that back because that’s my killer instinct right there, but it does give you a chance to focus on what you’re doing more.”
A national trend
The history of seven-on-seven football spans decades, with California an early hotbed.
Harry McCluskey, who coached high school football in Colorado and Texas for 37 years before taking over at Hampden Academy in 2005, has more than 30 years of experience with the concept and has watched
seven-on-seven football grow in conjunction with the changing themes of football in general.
“There was a time when we did it in Colorado in the late ’70s, and there was a lot more running back then so we actually had it that if you made a pitch, like in an option, that was a pass so the rule was the quarterback could keep it one out of every three plays,” said McCluskey, who has run a seven-on-seven summer program at Hampden for the last four years.
“But that’s changed a lot since then. We did a little of that here last year but we went back to doing seven-on-seven more traditionally this year.”
McCluskey, who still spends his off-season in Crosby, Texas, has seen seven-on-seven grow dramatically nationwide during the last 10 to 15 years, and has witnessed the effect of seven-on-seven leagues not only at the high school level, but also in the major college ranks.
“When John Elway was playing high school football in California they played 60 or 70 games of seven on seven in the summer,” he said, “so back then all the college quarterbacks were coming from California.
“Now a lot of the major college quarterbacks are coming from Texas because they’re doing so much seven on seven, and you look at all the college offenses and they’re all running the spread, so that’s a big part of it, too.”
Today in Texas, 128 high school teams compete in a seven-on-seven state championship tournament over three days each summer on the campus of Texas A&M University in College Station. More than 1,400 players participate, with the championship games televised on cable television.
Several other states, including Oklahoma, also have state tournaments of sorts, while USA Toda hosts a seven-on-seven national tournament in Williamsburg, Va.
“Coaches had really honed into having eight in the box and stopping the run, and I think the spread option offense has really changed that,” said McCluskey. “They’ve really added the passing game so they could get more people in space, and seven-on-seven has really helped enable teams take that next step.”
Maine’s football evolution
High school football in Maine has experienced similar change, from a preponderance of programs focusing on power running and occasional passing to a proliferation of spread offenses along with a gradually diminishing number of ground-oriented double-wing and power-I formations.
“A lot of teams are running the spread now,” said Pelkey. “In rec football we learned the power-I, running the ball at full speed and just learning how to tackle. I’m not a big fan of the spread offense myself because I like to hit guys and be able to crack some skulls. The spread is a little different, but you still have the same blocking schemes so it’s still football.”
One reason for that gradual change from power to pass-oriented football at all levels stems not just from the evolution of the game, but from the evolution of its participants.
“I think the biggest reason stems from kids at this age being more athletic and as a coach trying to use the entire field and trying to best use those athletes,” said O’Connell. “Seemingly the passing game gives you the best opportunity to go in that direction.
“The idea is that speed kills, and if you can get somebody with speed in an open area they’re going to have more of a chance to make a big play, and the more big plays you can make the better off you are.”
The most successful school in the state at employing the spread offense is Bonny Eagle, which has won four Class A state championships in the last six years.
And while Cooper, the Scots’ head coach, played in a more traditional offense while starting at quarterback at Lawrence of Fairfield during the 1980s, he sees seven-on-seven programs as crucial to keeping up with the football times.
“A good passing game is something that requires a lot of practice,” he said, “and in high school football — especially in Maine because everyone plays two ways — we don’t have enough time in preseason to develop a passing game and all the nuances that it takes to be able to throw the ball effectively.
“We need to be able to develop that during the summertime. We need to learn to run better routes, the quarterbacks need to learn how to do proper reads, we need to see different defenses, and on the defensive side of the ball we’ve got to learn different coverages and we’ve got to run them against different offenses. We’ve got to do all of that to be effective in the passing game on Friday nights in the fall.”
Cooper helped organize a seven-on-seven program in southern Maine six years ago. Originally it included Bonny Eagle, Deering of Portland, Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough, and now it involves virtually every team in Western Maine Class A as well as Eastern A powers Bangor and Lawrence, which began traveling south each Friday in July this summer.
“We learned in the state game last year that even though some of the teams up here run the spread, it’s not a pure spread like nearly all the teams do down at the other end of the state,” said 10th-year Bangor head coach Mark Hackett, whose team fell to Windham 35-21 in last year’s Class A state final. “And you can’t mimic the best of what another team is doing with your own players.”
Whether seven-on-seven football continues to grow in Maine remains a matter of conjecture, since compared to most other states it has a relatively small talent pool of athletes whose summer time often is divided among two or more sports — and often sports with a stronger off-season tradition such as baseball and even summer basketball.
But many of the state’s high school football coaches see seven-on-seven football as just as important to their sport’s growth as summer basketball or soccer programs are to their respective high school programs.
“If you talk to people outside of Maine, we don’t do it as much as they do,” said Cooper. “Down at the [Boston College football] camp I was speaking with some other coaches who were there with their teams, and they go seven-on-seven twice a week, Wednesdays and Sundays. When we compete against other teams it’s very obvious that these kids from other states have been running seven-on-seven because they know how to run routes, they know how to cover whether it’s zone or man, the quarterbacks know how to make reads and throw on time, all the things you develop in seven-on-seven.
“You look at the out-of-state kids and see what they’re doing and go ‘Wow, we’ve got to be doing this in Maine,’ because if we don’t keep up, then we’re doing our kids a disservice when they have the chance to go on to the next level compared to kids from other states.”
