Hooks impressed by all-star offensive line
By CHRISTOPHER DABE
June 8, 2010
Posted: June 8, 2010, 9:23 PM CDT
Longtime West Orange-Stark football coach Dan Hooks needed little time to figure out what he liked best about his squad of local high school all-stars Tuesday.
"Look at them go up the field," Hooks exclaimed as six offensive linemen jogged from one side of a football field to the other.
The largest five of those six players average close to 300 pounds, which Hooks believes will give his squad an edge in the trenches for the first Southeast Texas high school all-star football game. The game will be played 7 p.m. Saturday at Port Neches-Groves. Hooks will coach the East all-stars. Newton coach Curtis Barbay will coach the West.
Each team will conduct three practices. The first of those practices was Tuesday. The East stars practiced at Silsbee, and the West practiced at Hardin. The teams will also practice today and Thursday.
By then, the linemen should be in lockstep with each other. Only five will play at a time, and an additional lineman or two will rotate throughout Saturday's game.
"We're doing great right now," former PN-G center Klete LeBlanc said. "We just met each other today, and we're all talking, hanging out. There's nothing bad between us. We're new to each other, but we're just out here happy to be a part of this team."
Although the 6-foot-2, 270-pound LeBlanc strikes an imposing figure, he's hardly the largest player on the line. Next to LeBlanc at left guard is Ashton Reasons, a former PN-G player who stands in at 6-5 and 330 pounds. Also on the line are left tackle Eric Payne of Memorial (6-2, 245), right guard Scotty Utterback of Vidor (6-0, 323) and right tackle Brian Patton of Vidor (6-2, 300).
The smallest of the bunch is James Burns of Vidor (5-10, 210), who jokingly called himself "the midget."
Certainly, the collective group is an impressive one.
"That's like a thousand pounds of offensive line," said former Hardin-Jefferson quarterback Blake Venable, who will play next season at Howard Payne University.
"They make me feel safe," said former PN-G's Caleb Harmon, a Lamar University-bound running back who rushed for 1,832 yards and 20 touchdowns last season behind Reasons and LeBlanc.
Four of the linemen have college plans. Payne is signed to play at Grand View University, an NAIA school in Des Moines, Iowa. Reasons will walk-on at Blinn College, a two-year school in Brenham. Utterback plans to walk-on at Lamar and LeBlanc plans to walk-on at Texas State.
"These are all guys from successful programs so they all have a good background about how to be on a good offensive line," said offensive line coach Joe Dale Cary, who coaches at PN-G during the season. "They all have good offensive line coaches, so they're pretty easy to work with, especially when they're this big. It's a lot of fun to work with them."
Coaches said the large linemen will give the team a chance to run the ball effectively. The teams will keep their playbooks simple because practice time is limited to only three practices.
"We have a simple plan, a very simple plan to make sure everybody knows what their doing and execute it," said Hooks, who noted that the playbook will not be much larger than four run plays and four pass plays. "The secret is that you don't get penalties and you don't have turnovers, just like any other football game."
And, just like any other football game, a good offensive line helps.
