In less than one month, the 100th year of Commerce Tiger football will begin.
Fresh off of the Northeast Georgia Offensive Camp, which was held at CHS last week, the Tigers will hit the field for the first official day of practice on Friday.
Head football coach Steve Savage said the camp was one of the in its 13-year history, with around 220 participants.
“We had a good camp,” he said. “It worked out real well for us. The weather was nice and it cooperated. We felt like we got a lot done.”
Now the focus turns to hitting the field on Friday and on making year number 100 memorable.
The team’s concentration right now, Savage said, must be on themselves, and not on their opponents.
“We’re going to focus on the same thing Commerce always focuses one,” he said. “We’re going to pay a lot of attention to ourselves. We’re going to make sure we’re teaching the right fundamentals. That’s where we’ll start, by teaching the fundamentals of the game. Blocking, tackling, securing the ball.”
One thing that stood out about last year’s team was that, compared to Commerce football teams in the past, it was pretty small. Savage said that situation hasn’t changed much this year.
“We’re not as small as we were last year, we’re still small,” he said. “All our kids have grown and they’ve gotten a little bigger, but we’re still not a big football team.”
The Tigers went 6-5 overall last year, and 3-2 in the region, with losses in their last three games to end the year.
Savage said that there’s nothing that the team will focus on over the next month as a result of how the 2007 season went.
“No, (they are) totally different football teams,” he said. “We’ll focus on the fundamentals of the game, getting acclimated to the heat, and trying to learn the game and figure out what personnel goes where.”
Savage says right now, he and his team are ready to get the run-up to the first game under way.
“We just want to get started,” he said. “Sometimes the hardest thing to do is get started, and once you do, things start to roll from there. We’ll get started, and worry about Commerce and ourselves right now. We’ll just try to get better everyday.”
The season will begin in Commerce on August 29, with a historic season opening game against the Jefferson Dragons.
In 62 meetings, Commerce has been victorious 41 times, with 22 of those coming at home.
The Commerce faithful would love to see that number pushed to 23 in the first season opening pairing of the two rivals — especially after the Dragons broke a 12-game drought with a convincing 42-7 win at Memorial Stadium.
But right now the Tigers aren’t thinking about the season opener. They have other things to take care of over the course of the next 30 days.
“We’re not going to worry about that first game for a while yet,” Savage said.
