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8/5/07-Football
Prep football is for real come Monday
By Dan Stickradt of the Observer and Eccentric
The time of pretending and fantasizing are now over. At least for high school football players and coaches.
Come Monday morning, it's back to the real business.
High school practices from Temperance to Mount Pleasant to Ironwood and everywhere in between at some 650-plus football-playing high schools, will begin Aug. 6.
Summer is officially over.
Girls golf will begin Aug. 9 and the rest of the fall sports will begin officially Aug. 13.
"I can't wait," said Chris Lum, a senior-to-be at Lake Orion High School who was an Associated Press Class A All-State quarterback last autumn. "I'm kind of tired of just the passing camps and the workouts. I'm ready to start playing football for real."
There are 28 Eccentric-area schools set to return to the gridiron Monday - 12 of which made the playoffs last season.
Amongst that group are Lake Orion, Clarkston and Rochester Adams, all who will take their varsity teams to camps for the first three days. Clarkston will be at Saginaw Valley State, Lake Orion at Sauk Valley near Brooklyn and Adams at Albion College.
Oxford, like several other area schools, will stay on campus.
"It's great. It's nothing except football for the first three days," said Lum, who is receiving interest from more than a dozen Division I colleges. "There are no distractions. We can get a lot done."
Over the past two months, football players have engaged in ample weight training with passing camps, along with academies and football clinics.
"I know we're all looking forward to it," said veteran Clarkston head coach Kurt Richardson, whose team lost in the regional finals to eventual Division 1 state champion Macomb Dakota, 35-13. "I think we're going to be pretty good. We had a very good summer at passing camps. We did lose some good kids to graduation and some other kids that moved away. But I still think we're going to be good again."
There were no state champions from the area last season, although powerhouse Farmington Harrison did finish as the Division 3 state runner-up. Clarkston joined Birmingham Brother Rice and Walled Lake Central as teams that made the regional finals (Elite Eight).
Rochester Adams, Orchard Lake St. Mary's, Oxford, Farmington, Walled Lake Western, Bloomfield Hills Lahser and Birmingham-Detroit Country Day also made the postseason field.
The first week of games for varsity teams are Aug. 23-24. The MHSAA Selection Sunday Show for the 2007 postseason field will be Oct. 21 and the playoffs will commence on Oct. 26-27.
The state finals are set for Nov. 23-24 at Ford Field in Detroit.
"We're ready to go," said Lake Orion head coach Chris Bell on Thursday morning while meeting with some assistant coaches. "It's that time of year."
Football time of year.
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