Wood brings new approach
This is a season of new beginnings for two-time defending District 3-4A champion Randall.
Not only do the Raiders have a new head coach, Bryan Wood, they also are preparing to field an almost entirely new lineup. Randall is returning 26 lettermen but just three starters on each side of the ball.
“It’s really good for the kids from the aspect that every player has an equal shot at winning a spot because nobody is locked into a position,” said Wood, who moved from Sunray to succeed Ken Plunk. “The negative of that is that we don’t really know anything about this team. You just try to deal with it the best you can and evaluate where people belong in a hurry.”
Wood brought to Randall his wing-T offensive system that was successful for the Bobcats. While a change can often set a team back, the fact Randall already ran the ball consistently should help the transition.
“We are going to do pretty much the same thing we had been doing at Sunray, but Randall was doing a lot of that already,” Wood said. “They were kind of a run-first team, so it’s not going to be a big change. As far as the scheme goes, it’s going to be more about learning new names to formations and plays than putting that all together.
“It definitely helps that they have been running a system similar to this the last few years. If you were going into a program that had been running the spread offense and throwing it all over the place, then I’d either have to change my thinking or we’d be fighting that battle to change the mentality of the kids.”
When new coaches arrive, the offense generally struggles to adapt. The Raiders will likely be dealing with the opposite because the wing-T is similar to their former system while the new defensive scheme has more intricacies.
“I always try to keep things simple on defense, and I think that’s really important, especially in this situation since we don’t have very long to teach exactly what we want to do,” Wood said. “I think our defense is going to take a little more time to adjust to the new schemes than the offense will. It’s not a hard scheme, but it’s an aggressive attack defense, and that’s what we’re going with.”