EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — When Scotty Walden arrived at UTEP, he laid out five phases his football team would go through.
Phase I is winter conditioning; Phase II is UTEP’s boot camp; Phase III is spring ball; and Phase IV is summer workouts.
The UTEP football team began phase five: the season, on Thursday as the program kicked off its fall training camp.
“Out of all of our phases, this is the most important part,” UTEP senior wide receiver Trey Goodman said. “We categorize this phase as ‘rise’ of this is like rising to the occasion where we’re playing in front of fans. We’re competing at the highest level.”
“Now we finally get to see our true team and I’m really excited about the competition level,” UTEP head coach Scotty Walden said. “I don’t think there’s a person on our team that is in their room and they feel comfortable because there is massive competition in every room and that’s really fun when you have a team like that.”
As far as how the first practice of the fall camp went, the Miners have a lot of room to grow.
“Obviously, opportunity one. You know, it was opportunity one. I’ll say that today.” Walden said.
“Practice was intense. It was a little bit of like a shock your system day, but that’s exactly what we need,” UTEP redshirt junior quarterback Cade McConnell said. “You know, it’s hot out here. Sure. It was a hard practice. Sure. But that’s exactly what we need to condition and get ready for the rest of fall camp.”
“I thought offensively it looked good in the beginning. Then we got tired and our tempo went to heck, and then defensively I thought we flew around and did really good.” Walden said.
“I’m not a doomsday guy after opportunity one,” Walden said. We’ve got 64 new guys that never played with each other. We got to get that meshing and that gelling, that chemistry, so we got to be getting better every day.
So UTEP will continue to work away as it is less than a month away from its season opener at Nebraska on Aug. 31
Until then, there’s many questions surrounding this team like: How will this new brand of UTEP football look like? How well can the defense pick up new defense coordinator J.J. Clark’s schemes? And most importantly, a question Coach Walden even has for himself: who is going to be leading the offense at the starting quarterback position this year?
Skyler Locklear, Cade McConnell, Zach Rodriguez, Shay Smith, JP Pickles, and Michael Southern will all be competing for the starting quarterback spot this fall.
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