The only way high school football teams in Iowa can put pads on during the summer months is if you’re attending a team camp hosted by a college. During the earlier years of his coaching career, Adel-Desoto-Minburn first-year head coach Garrison Carter loaded his student-athletes onto a bus and traveled to one of the in-state institutions to compete at a team camp. Then, after his first season at Washington Community Schools, he came up with an idea of hosting his own padded team camp in town. “We could do this better,” Carter said, “One, we could provide (Washington) kids the opportunity to do this for free and two we can control this a little bit more. We decided to reach out to some community colleges, and we ended up hiring the Iowa Wesleyan coaching staff when I was at Washington to come up and run a camp at our facility.”

The difference between Washington’s full-padded team camp and others hosted by area colleges was the Demon coaching staff had control of which teams participated and the scheduling of scrimmages. Carter is continuing his full padded team camp at ADM this weekend. “We have Simpson College coming over to run it, and we’re really excited about the eight schools coming in here. We should get some pretty good scrimmages this weekend and have a pretty good idea of where our kids are at entering camp next week.”

The other schools coming to Adel this weekend for the padded team camp include the Bondurant-Farrar Bluejays, the Colfax-Mingo Tigerhawks, the Earlham Cardinals, Greene County Rams, Panorama Panthers, the North Polk Comets, and the West Marshall Trojans. The camp runs Saturday and Sunday afternoons at ADM Stadium in Adel.