Red/White scrimmage kicks off preseason

Mother Nature didn’t cooperate with the annual Tippecanoe football Red/White intrasquad scrimmage last week. The evening was cut short after the Red Devils took the field in front of parents and fans to officially kick off the 2024 preseason.

With practice less than a week old, the team did get in several plays before calling it quits when severe weather approached the area. Tipp coach Matt Burgbacher downplayed the weather because his team still took a lot away from this annual event.

“Even though it was abbreviated, I thought we had a great crowd, and it was great,” Burgbacher said. “It was great seeing a lot of faces out there. The thing I like about this scrimmage is we have 22 guys out there competing every play, so we get a lot of guys reps.”

“At the beginning of the scrimmage, our older guys got 32 really good plays where we had our best-on-best and were able to see some things.”

Despite the short evening, Burgbacher was impressed with what he saw during their time on the field.

“I liked the physicality up front,” he said. “We stressed that in the offseason, we stressed our speed, explosiveness, and our power. I thought all three of those were on display. It was the first time we really got after it.”

“It was good for our kids to get out in front of the community and be able to show what they do.”

In addition to what he saw with those aspects of the game, Burgbacher also liked that so many kids were able to perform well, which will lead to success this coming season.

“We showed that we have some depth,” he said. “We have positions where we have guys who need to continue to compete for that job, there is not just one or two of them.”

“Up front, we don’t have just three defensive linemen, we have 10-12 of them. We also saw that at outside linebacker where we play two and we have six-seven of them.”

Ronin LaBreck is a senior who is competing for the starting quarterback job with sophomore Larkin Thomas. Burgbacher knows with a younger player like Thomas, it is something where he will keep having constant improvement. 

“With Larkin we will have some growing pains there, but the good thing with him is he continues to get better every day,” Burgbacher said. “He makes mistakes, and that is why we did so many 7-on-7s this year to put him in those situations, and we haven’t seen the same mistake twice.”

*Tipp hosts Anna on Friday night for their final scrimmage of the season, 7 p.m. at the Tipp Park. This comes six days after traveling to Beavercreek this past Saturday to battle the Beavers and Alter in a tri-scrimmage. It’s all about getting better every scrimmage to get ready for Bellbrook on August 23.

“The biggest thing we want to continue to see is the growth in those three areas we talked about - speed, power, and explosiveness because that is Bellbrook. They will play smash mouth football, and they are the most aggressive defense we will play this year.”