They don’t keep score, and they’re not supposed to tackle to the ground in summer football scrimmages, but that didn’t mean Tuesday night’s get-together between Columbus North and Lawrence North was any less competitive.
The Bull Dogs and Wildcats battled for 90 minutes on the brand new turf at Max Andress Field. They played 30 minutes of 7-on-7, then 60 minutes of 11-on-11, with each team getting the ball for five minutes at a time.
Lawrence North scored three times in the 7-on-7 session, but the Bull Dogs kept the Wildcats out of the end zone in the 11-on-11 periods. Columbus North scored twice in the 11-on-11 on a 15-yard run by Michael Johnson and a 35-yard pass from Trenton Kelley to Langston Lunsford.
“I thought we did pretty well for it still being early in the summer,” Kelley said. “We got some good competition today from the (Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference). We have a couple young guys still getting used to competition and the physicality of our football, but overall, it was pretty good.”
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Kelley was without his two most experienced receivers. D’Andre Scruggs, who will be a senior, is coming off ACL surgery, and Preston Terrell, who will be a sophomore, is recovering from a hamstring injury.
Meanwhile, Kelley had his spleen removed after it was ruptured on the opening series of the Bull Dogs’ sectional final loss to Center Grove last year. He returned for the second half of basketball season and says he is back to 100 percent.
Columbus North coach Tim Bless was pleased with his team’s competitiveness on Tuesday.
“I’m maybe a little bit disappointed that it kind of feels like maybe we’ve regressed a little bit fundamentally from (Indiana University) camp a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “But I guess that’s understandable because we hadn’t competed against another team in a couple of weeks.”
At the IU camp, the Bull Dogs scrimmaged perennial powers Warren Central, Avon and Bloomington South, along with two teams from Illinois.
“Over at IU, we really competed,” Kelley said. “I was pretty proud of the guys. It’s quite a grind there — a couple practices a day — and we got really good competition, and we’ve just had the philosophy of, ‘Next man up,’ with a couple of injuries this summer. So it gets a lot of guys reps, and I think we’re really progressing.”
The Bull Dogs, who are coming off back-to-back 9-2 seasons, have two more summer scrimmages. They will host Whiteland on July 10 and will host a three-way scrimmage with Martinsville and New Albany on July 17.
