It’s day six of the official high school football season and it’s the first day teams may have full pads and full contact. For the varsity players of the Greene County Rams, it’s not actually the first time for either full pads or full contact, and head coach Mitch Moore explains. “We had an opportunity at the end of July to do a two-day, full padded, team camp. With what we put in this summer, we’re light years ahead offensively and defensively, so the camp gave us an opportunity to evaluate our depth chart early. One thing about the game of football, you can do a lot of simulations, but until you’re fully padded you don’t really know who can pull the trigger to hit, tackle, block, all those things. So, the full padded team camp on the weekend before we started our actual fall camp, has really paid dividends so far as we’ve gone through the first week of fall camp season.” Simpson College (Indianola) coaches conducted the camp at ADM High School in Adel.

The Rams host the North Polk (Alleman) Comets in the annual Sports Drink Scrimmage on Friday, Aug. 17 at Linduska Field at 7 p.m. The regular season opener is on Friday, Aug. 24 in Perry at Dewey Field as the Rams face the Perry Blue Jays in the first of four non-district games to begin the season. All nine regular season games count toward playoff qualification this season.