Scotland football competes in 7 on 7

LAURINBURG — The Scotland Fighting Scots football team competed in a seven-on-seven practice with teams from around the area Wednesday morning at Scotland High School. Both the offense and defense got valuable reps against players they don’t see everyday.

There were three teams Scotland played against: the Latta Vikings, the Fairmont Golden Tornadoes and the St. Pauls Bulldogs. This has been the first week of summer workouts for the team with regular practices held Monday and Tuesday before collaborating with a few other schools on Wednesday.

With Scotland wrapping up finals just two weeks ago, this was an important practice for the team as they look to get in shape for the grueling summer schedule. Head Coach Richard Bailey saw a lot of good in his team but also mentioned the need for his team to get some good conditioning in.

“We got to get in better shape, we haven’t really lifted hard in about a month because of school and exams,” Bailey said. “We also got a few new kids that we got to get caught up but I’m excited with where we’re at right now.”

As far as the offense, Bailey was especially impressed with the pass catching unit and gave positive reviews to Quatavius Everette, Jhi ‘Mir Bethea and Wyatt Locklear among others. He does however want to see the route running improve.

“We need to clean up how we’re running some routes and do some learning there,” Bailey said. “It’s early in the summer and they’ll get better as they get more reps.”

Defensively, some of the stars from the session included Shylan Harrell, Marlin Moore and Tytan Mccallum among others according to Bailey. He was happy with how they didn’t give up a lot of catches and contested everything well but thinks there is work to do coverage wise.

“I thought we did a really good job getting hands on balls,” Bailey said. “Getting everybody to the right spots with various coverages is something we got to work on but I was pleased.”

The team will run a normal practice on Thursday before traveling to Raleigh, North Carolina on Friday for a camp at North Carolina State University.