ORONO — The Jeff Cole Spring Scrimmage serves as the exclamation point to the spring season for the University of Maine football team.
Saturday’s seventh annual Cole scrimmage punctuated spring 2011 with a simple period.
With the Black Bears riddled by injuries, particularly at the linebacker position, coach Jack Cosgrove and his staff demonstrated the same restraint they had shown all month and refused to jeopardize players’ health.
UMaine scrapped its plans to conduct a full-contact scrimmage and instead went through an extended series of drills that nonetheless brought out the players’ competitiveness and enthusiasm.
“We didn’t want to put guys in harm’s way,” Cosgrove said.
“There’s a paranoia around here,” he added. “We’ve had some very strange injuries this spring.”
The players wore helmets and shoulder pads, but followed the inseason protocol for non-collision sessions and wore only shorts rather than hip pads and pants.
“We tried to keep everybody on their feet,” Cosgrove said.
The players wanted to have the opportunity to have one high-speed, full-contact session to finish off the spring. Instead, it was pretty much the same dynamic that had altered most of their 15 allowable spring workouts.
“It’s disappointing in some ways, because we haven’t played since the season ended,” said safety Trevor Coston, who will be a senior in the fall. “We’ve been training January through now and we wanted to get out here and hit, but we understand it’s for the better of the team, so we’ve just got to take it in stride.”
Saturday’s practice began with a couple of the more intense drills.
First, one blocker tried to keep a single pass rusher away from the quarterback. The rest of the team gathered around the middle of the field, with the defense exhorting the rusher and the offense cheering for the blocker.
Shortly thereafter, the Bears did a one-on-one drill pitting a receiver against a single coverage man during which the quarterback tried to complete a pass. That also featured plenty of energy.
“Those are things we do. We felt like we could provide a little bit of entertainment by injecting that here today,” Cosgrove said.
“We always have a one-on-one period, a competition period, every day. It kind of puts you in the public eye. Everybody sees you. It added some competitive juice to the whole situation.”
Regardless of the form and structure of the Cole scrimmage this time around, the players are focused on having a successful 2011 season. Good health is the first step.
Among the numerous players who did not participate in Saturday’s session because of injuries were senior linebackers Donte Dennis and Vinson Givans, senior running back/receiver Derek Session, junior defensive linemen Kris Enslen,Spencer Wood and Brent Rice and junior tight end Jeff Falvey.
Falvey is likely to miss next season after suffering torn knee ligament.
“We’ve got to do what’s best for the team right now,” said senior quarterback Warren Smith. “We couldn’t go out and scrimmage every weekend, because that’s not smart for our future.”
Improvement was evident during the spring season, but the Bears know they will have to make significant strides, both physically and mentally, if they hope to be more competitive in the Colonial Athletic Association.
“I thought we grew. I thought we got better,” Smith said. “We worked on the things that held us back last fall in our 4-7 season. It’s about the little things, buying into what the coaches are saying and going out and getting better every day.”
That process continues almost immediately. UMaine expects to have more than 50 players spend the summer in Orono, where they will train together in preparation for training camp in August.
“I thought we had a pretty productive spring,” said senior defensive tackle Raibonne Charles of Windham. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do and I think we realize that. It’s going to be an important summer.”