With the football team being so universally small this school year, the summer program and after-school conditioning have become crucial for our boys to bring home victories. Between the hours of summer conditioning and the virtually daily heat of the afternoons, their practices have been rigorous.

The conditioning that the team does slightly varies from day to day and is somewhat different than what they did over summer.

In the summer, the teams 7:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. day consisted of lifting in the weight room and moving onto the baseball field to do conditioning. On school days, the sophomore through seniors are most likely in zero period, which is from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. for sports conditioning and then do after school conditioning from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

“[Conditioning] is important because of the number of guys we have on the team this year,” says Adrian Reyes, a junior playing right guard for varsity.

With having only 23 varsity players, 21 on junior varsity, and 24 on the freshman team, it is important to understand how to work together and communicate effectively to complete the plays. Understanding how to execute those traits successfully can help when the team gets affected by the heat.

“Emotionally the heat just sucks, to be honest. Everyone is suffering in the heat and we usually get over it. It’s just something we adjust to as players,” the varsity right tackle and defensive tackle junior, Caleb Delgado, explains.

The extreme heat the valley has had to deal with from the summer has seemed to let up over the past couple of weeks.

“[The boys] have been lucky because the heat ended a couple weeks ago. Part of playing football in the Central Valley is it being hot in the afternoon,” one of the football coaches, Christopher Musseman, says.

Some warmth is sadly here to stay and keeping in the 90-degree range, but Reyes says, “It is just something we deal with. At the end of the day, we are all there to get better. We just want to win.”