Charles Henderson will welcome three schools for the 2017 Wiregrass OTAs on Thursday. Charles Henderson, along with Dale County, Luverne and Autauga Academy, will hit the field of Veterans Memorial Stadium for a day of drills and competitions.

“It’s just like anything else– when you get through camp and through the summer you get tired of competing against each other,” said Charles Henderson head coach Brad McCoy. “In an OTA, what it allows you to do is the same things you are doing in practice everyday against each other; you get to bring guys in for a one-day camp and work against other people.”

The camp will begin at 9 a.m. inside the stadium and will feature drills for offensive lineman and skill positions.

The day will consist of one-on-one drills with receivers going up against defensive backs as well as offensive linemen going up against defensive linemen.
The day will then transition into 7-on-7 drills where each team will matchup with one another in a round-robin style format.

“It’s a round-robin,” McCoy said. “We keep rotating through until everybody has done all the one on ones and all the 7-on-7’s. When the 7-on-7’s are going on, the linemen are doing what we call 5-on-4. They will do 5-on-4 run and 5-on-4 pass.”

Following that, the two teams will have a lunch break and listen to a guest speaker from the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

The afternoon will finish up at 1 p.m. with teams going up against each other 11-on-11, again in a round robin format.

Thursday’s OTA is all about giving the players the opportunity to partake in everyday drills while at the same time throwing a little bit of competition into the mix.

“It’s a lot of fun,” McCoy said. “That’s what football is: a competition. You can see the kids turn it up a notch when they see a different color jersey, a different color helmet coming into the stadium. It’s all of a sudden not a practice anymore– it’s a game. They relate to that.”

For some players of certain positions, today’s activities will be the only competition they receive during the entire summer.

“I really love it; it’s a lot of fun,” McCoy said. “It gets the linemen involved. Unless linemen go into an individual camp, there is really nothing else linemen do to compete against one another until we started this OTA format.”

It was an idea that McCoy borrowed from the National Football League.

“We got this really from the NFL,” McCoy said. “The NFL guys do this in late spring and early summer to get ready for their full contact training camps.”

Each drill will be non-contact on Thursday.