NORFOLK, Va. - Old Dominion University football had their first practice of the day Friday morning for the 13th practice this fall.
The biggest difference in practice this morning came from Head Coach, Bobby Wilder. During the first period of individual work, Wilder interrupted practice and called for 11-on-11 team drills, so the Monarchs could work on “sudden change” situations.
During the team drills, the defense came up with a pair of sacks from Malik Gumbs, and one apiece from Scott Wiggins and Gary Scruggs. Kicker Ricky Segers made kicks from 47 and 54 yards on the day.
The Monarchs will be back out for a closed practice later this afternoon at the L.R. Hill Complex.
Comments from Coach Wilder:
On today’s different practice:
“What we did this morning is what we call our sudden change. Show the kids what can happen in a game. What I mean by sudden change is, opening drive our offense goes down and scores a touchdown. Then we kickoff, they’ve got the ball, run a couple plays and our defense gets an interception. What we say on the sidelines is that’s a sudden change. Now the offense has got to come off the bench when they weren’t expecting to go back in the game. We tell them to go out, take a deep breath and execute. Conversely that could happen to our defense, they could be on the sideline, we could have a turnover on offense and we yell sudden change and the coach could be in the middle of making an adjustment and they’ve got to get up and go play defense. So we put them in that situation in practice, I blew the whistle and yelled sudden change and we went into live scrimmage. I thought they reacted well to it and the biggest thing is to come out, take a deep breath know the situation and play football.”
On today’s second practices’ focus:
“Today will primarily be just fundamentals and special teams; it will only be about an hour practice because we went hard this morning. This was a good two hour practice. So today, get back and focus on our punt team, kickoff return, punt blocking and give each unit about 15 minutes to advance their schemes in those three phases. The coaches in charge of the offensive linemen, defensive linemen will work on a lot of fundamental work, reviewing responsibility and technique.”