As Ruston High begins the summer prep to defend its first state championship in over 30 years, head coach Jerrod Baugh sat down with the LPJ to give his thoughts on how his new roster is doing with the fall approaching.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for continuity. Part 2 will run tomorrow.
Lincoln Parish Journal: “Following spring practice, what are your overall thoughts as you have been able to digest the month of May and how you feel about this new team returning after winning a state championship?”
Jerrod Baugh: “I thought we got a lot of the things done during the spring that we needed to get done. You know, once you scrape the seniors off of the depth chart, and then you start plugging in guys and shuffling the rest up, you have your ideas of what guys have done during junior varsity games or during varsity games — all during the year. So you have an idea of what that looks like. But you don’t actually really know until you start putting those guys out there together to see what that looks like.
“We had that opportunity in the spring. I thought we ironed some of those things out in some areas. We still have some work to do, but I think it gave us a very good starting point coming into the summer to figure out where we need to continue to really press some guys in some areas. And so, I think it’s just a continual deal. You know, we’ll have some time in June where we’re doing some seven-on-seven things so some skill guys will have opportunities to get in this spot, that spot and continue to see how they’re doing and hopefully get as many of those things ironed out before you get into week one, as you can.
“Once you get into the meat of the season, you’d like to try to get where you’re not juggling guys in the middle of the season still trying to figure out who can do what and who needs to be where. If you have to, you have to, but you’d like to have all of those things ironed out so that you can give those guys an opportunity to continue just to play together and jell together and be comfortable with each other.”
LPJ: You graduated an incredible senior class, mostly on the defensive side of the football — a lot of Division one scholarship opportunities. That’s obviously the question that everybody has: what does the defense look like moving into the future after this graduating class? What what is your early assessment of that heading into the summer?
JB: “You know, it’s one of those things everybody’s completely aware of: you lose those big name guys that we have defensively, and, immediately, everybody says “the defense is going to take a while before they get things together.” And I think those kids that are that are moving into those spots — they’ll take that as a challenge. I think they probably, quietly, already have. And, I was pleased with what I saw defensively during the spring. And again, we’ve still got some work to do.
“You start sliding guys around and pushing them up in the depth chart and all of that. We meet with them and do our exit meetings in January, February and March and specifically talk about those things and what our expectations for them are. And (the players) talk about what their expectations for the next season are. I made sure to tell those guys that we’re expecting to fill those spots like (linebacker) Zander Hayes — we don’t need you to be Jayden Mayfield. That’s not what we’re asking you to do. You need to be Zander Hayes. Zander’s going to do some things better than Jaden. And he’s not going to do some things as well as Jaden — but we don’t want him running around trying to be someone that he’s not. He needs to settle in and be himself and and just learn how to play.
“I think that was a comfort to some of them because when you come behind a really good player, you feel like I need to live up to that. And that’s not really what we need him to do. We need them to get out there and be the best version of themselves. I think the kids understood that. And offensively, whenever we were moving Josh (Brantley) in there at quarterback last year and we had some new receivers, it took a little while to try to really hone in on what our identity was on offense. It’s a, you know, a progressive process.
“But, overall,I think those guys came a long way in the spring. I think they’ll continue to do that in the summer. And I think it’ll probably be surprising to some people during the year about how those guys have accepted the challenge of what it’s like to be replacing those really good players that we lost due to graduation.”
LPJ: “You talked about Zander — who were some of the other players that we may not have heard much about in the last couple of years that you’ve seen rise to that challenge, on both sides of the ball?”
JB: “Replacing all three safeties is a big deal. I mean, you take Jacoryian Crowe out of the fold. You take Nate Johnson out of the fold, and Ronald Finley — those three get the majority of the snaps at the at the safety spot. Now we’re plugging in juniors Miles Brown, Alex Hunt and Trindon Moore and sophomore Jayden Anding — we kind of worked a bunch of those guys in there at those spots. We’ve got to put some pressure on them to be able to really see what it is that they’re going to be able to execute and do under pressure situations. It’ll be interesting to see kind of how that turns out.
“I thought it was good during the spring that Aiden Anding was in the state track meet the first week. That allowed us to rotate a bunch of corners. I thought that that was good because we needed to find who the next guy is now that Semaj Jones is gone. Fabian Stringfellow had gotten some snaps last year at corner and safety. He was kind of our next defensive back in in the ball game, but we needed to look at all of those guys and give them an opportunity to get out there. It’s the same thing in the defensive line. I think we returned two guys that were starters, but we had some other guys that had rotated in at times — you just start plugging guys in to see what it’s going to look like there. And again, I was really pleased with how that looked.
“The same thing offensively. We got some guys to replace there — we lost Zhy Scott, who is really versatile player and able to do so many things as you know. We need to know what Cullen Clark and Jake Tyler are they’re able to do. So we really need to push them to see if they can do those things. If you don’t, then you got to change personnel groupings and you just have to do some things differently. And the better job you do to figure all of those things out before the season starts, the more you can really continuously work on what our guys can do through the season. The quicker you can do that, it allows you to be able to work that what you are able to do really well over and over during the season to get really good at it.
“Obviously the clock is ticking. We need to we evaluate that daily as we come in and say “we need to quit fooling with this — he can’t do it or yes he can.” We need to push him to do it and and figure out all of those things. You got to continue to work at it and continue to evaluate.”
Part 2 will run tomorrow.
