CRESTVIEW — Rainy conditions ended the Crestview Bulldog Football Camp’s first session early on Monday evening.
Rain aside, everything seemed to go well at the camp, and the 50 or so players ages 4-12 seemed to have a good time.
The camp was the first under the direction of first-year Bulldog head coach Tim Hatten, who was pleased with the number of campers.
“For it being our first year and it looking like it was going to rain, those are good numbers to start with,” he said.
Photo gallery>>>Crestview Bulldog Football Camp.
The camp opened with about 15 minutes of stretching before moving into drills.
“We just want to show the kids a little bit of structure and how to move around with some agility stuff,” Hatten said. “We want to help them know things about every position in football. Some of my best football players as skill players started off as linemen, so you never know what they are going to do.
“We teach all of them a little about every position if we can. We want to give them a base of knowledge of every position, and that’s what we were doing when the rain hit.”
The campers received coaching at receiver, linebacker, defensive back, offensive line, defensive line, quarterback and running back.
“We were rotating around to seven different stations of football and teaching them a little,” Hatten said. “It’s always exciting to see young kids learning the game.”
"When you have a kid that comes out there and knows nothing about the game, it’s kind of fun to watch them learn more than trying to project what they are going to be.’
Hatten wasn’t hoping to use the camp to evaluate prospects for the future.
“You will see the future of our program at the middle schools,” he said. “As I spend more time in Crestview we are going to evaluate what we have coming up.”
The biggest goal for the camp was establishing the Crestview High School football team’s presence in the community.
“We want to build a relationship with them,” Hatten said. “A couple of them will stick with you and you will know their names and they will come out every year.
“That’s kind of what we are hoping to do.”
Randy Dickson is the Crestview News Bulletin’s sports editor. Email him at randyd@crestviewbulletin.com, tweet him @BigRandle, or call 682-6524.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Rain can’t stop Bulldog Football Camp (photo gallery)