By Marshall Tempest
Reporter
We are just a month away from seeing the new look of the Apopka Blue Darter football team during the spring football game. The Blue Darters will face the Jones Tigers on Friday, May 23 at Jones.
This week head coach Jeff Rolson told The Apopka Chief the team is focused on getting their minds and bodies right. Rolson is all about finding the guys who want to be Blue Darters and putting everything they have into being successful on the field.
Rolson said that replacing many players comes with bringing in new faces. With those new faces, he says everybody says they are ready to work and put the effort in, but not everyone shows it on the practice field.
“We need to drill down on the guys that really want to be out here and do the things they need to do to succeed,” Rolson said.
During the offseason, Apopka has lost a lot of personnel on the player and coaching sides. With players graduating and transferring and coaches retiring and transferring, this year will bring a whole new look for Apopka football. However, he also emphasized that transfers are not a massive loss for the team.
“We didn’t lose anyone with huge productive numbers,” Rolson said. “We’re all about coaching the guys that want to be here. If they want to go somewhere else – godspeed, we wish them the best.”
Rolson said that the team is without an offensive coordinator but hopes to find one by the time the fall season starts. He said that he would be the pseudo-offensive coordinator for now, calling the offense during the spring game.
A big thing Rolson has been discussing since last season’s end is simplifying the offense and getting back to what he knows works. The famous Blue Darter single-wing formation will return in the upcoming season. Apopka fans will see it in the spring game. Rolson told me he wants to return to that brand of smash-mouth football focused on physicality and wearing down the opposing defense. But he also said the team would still throw the ball quite a bit.
“I think we’ll throw the ball more than people think. I think we’ll throw the ball a lot more than our kids think, too,” he said. “But we’ve got to be able to be successful in the passing game. We got to be efficient throwing the football. So, we’re going to find things that we throw well, and we read well, and we are not going to take or give up sacks and get our quarterback beat up.
Rolson told me that the team has obviously had its deficiencies on offense recently. Still, he hopes that simplifying the playbook will help. He also said that he has tailored their offense to their players instead of trying to tailor their players to the offense.
“Simplification and old school physical football,” Rolson said. “In these first couple weeks, we are just trying to see what we have and what we can do. We’re not going to try to do things that we don’t have guys to do.”
When Rolson discussed the Apopka backfield, he said he hadn’t found their No. 1 guy yet. They are still looking for a running back who is not only capable and skilled but also embraces the physical nature of the position, especially in the new offensive scheme Rolson has drawn up.
“We’ll find the guy – we’ve got to find several,” Rolson said. “We’re going to have a bunch of different packages. We’re going to play a bunch of guys this spring and try to figure out what we got.”
When Rolson talked about matching up with Jones, he pointed out that they may be more athletically or physically gifted than Apopka, so they’ll mostly stick to the run. He said that the team may not match up against their coverage, given that the Jones perimeter guys are very skilled.
“They’re going to have elite skill,” Rolson said. “We may be really physical and heavy on the run because we may not match up perimeter-wise. We’ll just have to see. But we’re going to take some shots.”
Rolson hopes the spring game will give the coaching staff a thorough look at the team’s capabilities. He thinks that no matter the game’s result, seeing guys in actual game scenarios will be good. From the game, he and the other coaches should be able to narrow down what works and what doesn’t and how to coach up the players to improve in the areas they need to.
“I think after spring, we’ll have a really good idea of what we can do,” Rolson said. “Summer will be all about modifying that, seeing what we can do to improve, trimming stuff, whatever we’ve got to do.”
Rolson said the summer will pass quickly.
“Summer is only six weeks of workouts,” Rolson said. “That’s 18 workouts at three a week. So, we are going to try and make the most of them and try to grow closer as a unit and as a team.”
