The FHSAA-sanctioned 20 days of spring football practice usually ends with a scrimmage game, and most area teams are taking advantage. Yes, the games don’t count. But a lot can be learned by taking the field.
Here is what The News-Press and Naples Daily News learned watching Southwest Florida teams as they get ready to dive into summer with the start of the “Real” football season only two months away.
Friday, May 16
Fort Myers High
In the spring, tough opponents teach tough lessons.
The Fort Myers football team rolled out its 2025 football squad in front of a home crowd with a 3-team jamboree. A 24-17 loss to Lake Wales and a 28-7 loss to Port Charlotte – each in 24-minute games – looked outwardly like trouble for the coming season.
But one of the purposes of spring games is to show teams what they need to fix for the fall, when the games do matter. So despite the scores, getting beat by the Pirates (10-3 and a regional finalist last fall) and Highlanders (7-4 and a regional semifinalist) was not a loss so much as a lesson.
Fort Myers deviates from most other schools in that they have a three-week spring session instead of four. The philosophy is that conditioning is done in the summer while spring is more for instruction.
“We don’t get them in shape in the spring,” Green Wave head coach Sam Sirianni Jr. said. “Coming from other sports in a short time, we get them in shape over the summer because we’re going to ask a handful of our best players to go play a lot two-ways.”
In Friday’s jamboree, each team played a “shortened” game of two 12-minute halves against each other, the word “shortened” being quotes because the first game, Lake Wales vs. Fort Myers, featured a lot of scoring, passing, running out of bounds, and…
Source link : https://www.news-press.com/story/sports/high-school/football/2025/05/17/what-we-learned-about-sw-florida-high-school-football-teams-from-2025-spring-games/83522234007/
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Publish date : 2025-05-17 14:24:00
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