SECTION IV FOOTBALL: WAVERLY'S MILLER DIDN'T SEE WHAT HE WAS LOOKING FOR IN SCRIMMAGE (24 PHOTOS) (2019-08-30)
By TIM BIRNEYValley Sports ReportWAVERLY "” Longtime Waverly football coach Jason Miller has certain things he looks for during a scrimmage, and those things were lacking Friday morning at Memorial Stadium in the Wolverines' three-way scrimmage against SVEC and Harpursville.
"What I look for in scrimmages is to see who has a killer instinct and who wants to play football.
"I want to see who can block, who can tackle, and who will hustle from play to play. I'm not so sure I saw a lot of that today," said Miller. "Right now, we have a lot of work to do on our attitude."
"The scrimmage for us is a glorified practice. We're not gonna show anything and allow someone to be able to prepare for us," he added.
Offensively, the Wolverines were very vanilla in their approach.
"We ran three or four plays, and we saw some good stuff.
"I'm sure we'll look at film and there are things that are glaringly bad, and there will be things that stick out in the film that didn't necessarily stick out during the live look," said Miller.
Defensively, Miller said he had a chance to see a lot of guys in live action.
"At times, we were pretty soft, but I think we were pretty solid inside against the run.
"We rotated in a lot of people," said Miller. "We got our first guys out in all of our series, so I don't know if they ever got into a real rhythm.
"We got a lot of guys playing time, and that's what we were looking to do," added Miller. "We were looking for guys who stand out that may not have been given much of an opportunity in practice."
The Wolverines will open their regular season next Friday against Class A Union-Endicott, and will play in the rugged Class B against the likes of Chenango Forks, Maine-Endwell, and Owego.
"We've got a long way to go," said Miller. "The competition we'll face is not this (Class C SVEC and Harpursville); this is not what we will be playing against.
"We certainly don't want to walk out of here with any false sense of confidence, and I don't think we have much of a reason to do that," he noted.
"We have our work cut out for us," added Miller. "We need a toughness like we've never had here before to be able to survive what's coming at us."
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IN PHOTO 1: Waverly coach Jason Miller. ... PHOTOS BY TIM BIRNEY.
