Sowing the Seeds for a Fruitful Season

Some new coaches win the press conference when they take a new job. New Lely head football coach Ben Hammer is winning Spring Practice.

There was a palpable buzz in the air at Trojan Stadium Thursday afternoon, and it wasn’t just because Hammer had speakers playing his players’ favorite music while they’re practicing.

“There’s more of an urgency,” Guerschom Guerrier notices. Guerrier ran for 2,883 yards and 30 touchdowns as one of Lely’s best-ever running backs. “He has a commanding presence. And we were never allowed to have music out here before.”

Hammer, a college lineman, still looks like he could line up and play. He’s happy, for the most part, with what he’s seeing from his players.

"The kids are bringing great attitude,” Hammer said. “Great energy, great enthusiasm and great effort every day. As far as execution and fundamentals, we've got a long way to go, but we're excited to go there.” 

Hammer’s practices are snappy. Think of a two-minute drill at the end of a football game. Hammer’s practices hum along at that pace. But the kids aren’t panicked. They’re making plenty of mistakes, but they’re being coached every step of the way.

"The kids are excited,” Hammer said. "Coaches are excited. “We're pretty fired up to be out here having a good time.”

Hammer doesn’t have his full complement of athletes with baseball and track season still underway. He hopes to get those players back at some point during the Spring.

“We've got probably,” Hammer said, "I'm going to round guess 50 out here. None of the baseball guys are here yet. Four by one team, four by four team, both qualified to go to the region in track. Six of those guys are football guys, too. So they've been coming to meetings but haven't been doing a whole lot. And then they play in the Spring Game. They will. We should have the baseball players back Tuesday. It depends how far they go. Hopefully, they'll play in the Spring Game. And then Josh Philogene is on his visit to UMass this weekend. So he missed today, but he's been here every other day."

Hammer is replacing one of the best running backs and one of the best quarterbacks the program's ever produced in Guerrier and Jakeem Tanelus. Hammer looks at the challenge as a team challenge.

“The kids are working hard,” he said. "We've got a long way to go. We've got a couple of kids taking reps at running back right now. The exiting quarterback's younger brother Jayvian is doing a nice job at running back. Collin Raymond's doing a great job at quarterback. And those two have been great about hanging around and helping out. Ariel Pierre has been around helping us out, so it's awesome to have those guys come back home. It's awesome to have Culmer St. Jean out here and Jacques Fritz has been out here a lot too. So it's been fun. We're all out here together in a boat rowing the same way."

Hammer said his practices are urgent by design.

"We’re going to be urgent in everything we do,” Hammer said. “Something we've talked about is patience in the long run, urgency in the day-to-day. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. So we're going to get after it. As coaches, we set the tempo and set the pace and the kids will fall in. We're still working and getting there, but the kids have had great enthusiasm so far."

The players were wearing shoulder pads Thursday, but Hammer wasn’t too concerned about making practice too physical too fast.

“We've technically started hitting now,” Hammer said, "we're going to be physical, we're going to be sound, we're going to be fundamental as far as like lining up and bashing into each other. We're not going to put kids in harm. We're going to make sure they're contact-prepped. We're going to prep for contact and make sure our kids are set up to succeed."

The Trojans have an inter-squad game coming up.

"We're going to have an intrasquad scrimmage on May 11, the Orange and Black game. For $3 it's going to be a fundraiser for our program. We're super excited about it. We want everyone to come back. We're going to play two 20-minute halves with a 20-minute alumni flag game in the middle. So we want all sorts of people to come out here wearing the orange and black, a real family atmosphere. We also want them to see this year's version of the Trojans. So we're excited about that night.