Dresden football using barn as weight room
Dresden’s football team has had a change of venue for part of its workouts this summer.
“Yeah, we’re having to do part of our work in the gym,” senior linebacker Hudson Nanney said. “And we moved all of our squat racks to a barn behind the school.”
The team’s weight room is being renovated, and it’s scheduled to be completed at the end of this week. Until it is completed, there’s extra conditioning work to be done as the school owns a few acres of pastureland with a couple of barns for agriculture classes to do work throughout the year.
The football team moved its squat racks to one of the barns.
“(Dresden coach Levi Estes) has us sprint to the barn, and we’re back there squatting next to a horse,” said Nanney, who had five sacks in the Lions’ semifinal win over Wayne County last November. “He’s in another part of the barn separate from us, but we’ll go over and pet him.”
Nanney said doing work in the barn is a nice change of scenery for the team as it goes through summer workouts. But he wishes there were a few extra things Estes would let them do.
“We ask him every day if we can wear our boots to work out in, but he wants us looking like a football team when we work out,” Nanney said. “Sometimes when we’re sprinting to the barn or sprinting back to the school, we go by the other barn where the pigs are and we’ll get a whiff of them. That never smells good.”
Nanney said workouts are going well for the defending Class 1A champions. Estes and the coaching staff are emphasizing conditioning and perseverance without a break.
“After a couple hours of work, we’re pretty tired because we don’t stop, we don’t take breaks and we don’t sit down,” Nanney said. “It’s just go, go, go the whole time we’re there.
“But it’s helping because we’re all doing a lot better in that final few minutes of the practice than we were when we started.”
The Lions open the season Aug. 17 when they travel for their annual Thursday season opener at Westview.
Reach Brandon Shields at bjshields@jacksonsun.com or 731-425-9751 and on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or Instagram at jacksonsunsports.