Just when the football program looked done at Camp Verde Middle School, 25 players and new head coach Brian Parker stepped in to give the Cowboys life for another fall.
“At the end of June, my son and I finished baseball season, and they said nobody was really interested in coaching the team,” said Parker, the team’s former offensive coordinator who replaced his long-time superior, Brian Pelfrey. “So, about three weeks ago, I started going out to open field and took the job.”
In that time, the team blew up from 15 players, practicing part-time over the summer with Camp Verde High School, to 40 by Aug. 8.
“Right now, we’re just conditioning,” said Parker, whose team begins full-contact practice Monday, Aug. 22. “We’re really concentrating on core exercises — ladders, leg lifts, the merry-go-round, push-ups, I could go on and on.
“It’s hard to tell who you’ve really got before they start hitting. Once [they] start, they’re just going to battle it out. My starting lineups are going to be week to week.”
Parker, a local youth football coach, added that the transition to coaching middle school players, at least as far as their attention span is concerned, is a formidable one.
“There actually is,” he said. “Just maturity, the mental game. It just seems that the older kids get it and pay attention more than the younger kids.”
So he made sure to surround himself with coaching colleagues from the league: Alby Bryant, Nick Dubs, Brian Rayburn, Richard Smith and defensive coordinator Chris Zellner.
“I might give somebody the special teams job,” Parker said. “Pat Oium’s helping out with the line right now. He was in the town league three years.”
Oium is in charge of 12 linemen who can play on both sides of the ball.
Twins Blake and Isiah Chapman, eighth-graders and first-year players, lead a deep, stout unit that could have been even bigger, Parker said.
“I had a kid come up to me I really would’ve liked to have had,” he recalled. “He’s a big kid. They wanted him to wrestle all year, so we couldn’t let him bend our schedule.”
Offensively, they’ll be blocking for “a ton” of skill players whose positions are wide open, Parker said — including the tight end, who will also be blocking with the offensive linemen at times.
“We’ve got a lot of talent, let’s just put it that way,” he said. “The future’s looking good for Camp Verde in the next four to five years.”
Especially at quarterback, where Parker’s son, Wyatt, last fall’s starting quarterback for the local youth football Minors team, is battling with fellow seventh-grader Cole Gillespie for the same privilege at CVMS.
“We have our eyes on them,” Parker said. “We’re just basically working to have two quarterbacks in case somebody gets hurt in the middle of the season.”
They’ll be handing off to seventh-grader Corey Johnson and eighth-grader Mason Rayburn, “one of our stud backs,” Parker said.
“He’s really quick and got some moves,” Parker said. “Corey’s a bruiser — just powerful. Busts through the line. He can read the quarterback.”
So Johnson will most likely play middle linebacker as well as fullback for CVMS.
When Johnson is not making reads on defense, eighth-grader Michael Martin has been finding the edge consistently on the outside, Parker said.
“Where he’s shining right now is at defensive end,” he said. “He’s going in there and getting the quarterback almost every time during drills.”
The big wide receivers for the Cowboys will be seventh-graders Jacob Oothoudt and Bryce Seekins, also a solid
cornerback in the CVMS secondary, Parker said.
“Jacob has great hands,” he said. “Looking forward [to] a few pass plays.”
Since a few soccer players are among the 40 who came out, Parker won’t be making any cuts but may, on the contrary, try to use one kicker and punter for the whole season.
The biggest goal of the program under Parker may be simply to win a game, which the Cowboys couldn’t do last fall.
“Obviously, we want to win games this year,” he said. “But it’s also important you teach these kids everything you know about football so they’re prepared for high school.”
For the Cowboys’ full schedule, please see the Wednesday, Aug. 17, issues of the Camp Verde Journal and Cottonwood Journal Extra.
