Today is the last day of the first week of official practice for Iowa high school Fall sports. It’s also the first day of full contact for the Greene County Rams on the football field. Caden Duncan is the head coach and he talks about the practice plan for today. “You’re going to see a lot of tackling drills and things like that, trying to get guys accustomed to wearing full pads. We don’t just line up and smash into each other for two hours.” The coach added some years ago, nearly all teams did that on day one of full contact, but not anymore.

The coach added, “We’ll do a little bit of live tackling, then maybe do a mini-scrimmage or a half-side of the field scrimmage where you don’t have all your linemen, things like that. We want to get a little bit of live hitting going, but at the same time we’re still preaching safety. We don’t want any ‘friendly fire’ and hurt our own teammates.”

The Rams host Nevada in a practice scrimmage starting at 5:30 p.m. at Linduska Field in Jefferson on Aug. 20. Admission to the scrimmage is a container of sports drink. The regular season begins at 7 p.m. on Aug. 27 in Guthrie Center vs. ACGC. Again this season all Ram games will be broadcast on KG98 and will be streamed on www.raccoonvalleyradio.com.