Michael Bradley has been coaching long enough to know the terms.
Rebuilding. Reloading. Both words mean essentially the same thing, just with a different slant.
While some people might use one or both when discussing the fortunes of the 2011 New Hope High School football team, Bradley prefers another term: Revamp.
After losing 19 seniors from a playoff team that went 8-5, that word is as good as any when it comes to assessing the state of the 2011 Trojans.
“We lost a lot of quality players from last season, and we had several guys who played three years, and even a couple of guys who played all four years,” Bradley said. “Franklin Richardson (Jr.), Terrance Dentry, and Johnny Beamon were all four-year players, so we”re going to be doing some revamping next year.”
Bradley would love to have Richardson Jr., Dentry, and Beamon because they were his second, third, and fourth leading gainers in total offense behind senior quarterback Zak Thrasher, who also will graduate.
Dentry rushed for 1,000 yards and had 12 touchdowns, Beamon caught a team-high 40 passes, while Richardson Jr. rushed for five scores and caught five more passes for touchdowns.
Factor in the 2,123 yards and 18 touchdowns by Thrasher and Bradley said things will look a lot different on offense with only two or three starters returning on offense.
“Our personality is going to change,” Bradley said. “We had some guys the last couple of years who were threats to score anywhere on the field. We”re losing those guys and obviously it makes us have to change our personality and go from a team that tries and lives for the big play to a team that is more of a basehitting team that gets 3 to 4 to 5 to 7 yards a play instead of getting big chunks.”
Bradley feels more comfortable on defense with six or seven starters returning on that side of the ball. But the loss of assistant coach Jacob Owen, who will be the defensive coordinator at Poplarville High School in the fall, is the first change on the coaching staff in four years. Owen coached the defensive backs at New Hope.
That change will be another one the Trojans will have to adjust to as they try to carve out a new identity. It”s something they have done the past two years after graduating 23 seniors in 2008 and 15 in 2009. New Hope had its best finish with Bradley as coach in 2009, when it went 11-2 and suffered its only losses to eventual Class 5A state champion West Point.
Even though the losses were high, Bradley is optimistic the injuries that ravaged his team last season (27 players missed at least one game) gave younger players an opportunity to see playing time. Entering his sixth season and coming from a 1-9 start, Bradley believes a system is in place to help make it easier for players to step into bigger roles.
Now it is time for those players to show they can handle those jobs.
“(The spring) is going to be critical,” Bradley said. “The goal of our spring practice is to try some people at some positions that maybe they have not played before and to develop our own personality. The goal on Friday night doesn”t change. The goal is to be as good as you can possibly be, and there are a lot of parts and pieces that go into making that puzzle. Our goal in the spring is to try to find as many pieces as we can and get them into the right places.”
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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