PI-TV: Competition Continues at QB and More Spring Camp Nuggets
With just two practices remaining in this year's East Carolina spring football camp, first year Pirate head coach Scottie Montgomery made the most of one of them on Wednesday.
The setting was Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium where Montgomery's team went through a two-hour workout on fresh Bagwell Field turf in the hope of squeezing every last ounce of work from his personnel both in terms of players and coaches.
"We have one more on Friday, but that was the last one where we hit our details you know with special teams. That was a practice all about operation," Montgomery told PirateIllustrated.com, "Our team knows how important the operation is. We've been physical. Today was about putting that on tape where they could work on it without their coaches. We'll take a look at it on tape to make sure it was right, but we are happy where we were from a standpoint of on and off. I thought our coaches did a good job from the box down to the sideline and then just everybody working together."
This was Montgomery's initial spring camp at East Carolina and we asked him how he think it all went overall for a first time deal with a brand new staff.
"The staff worked really hard. We spent a lot of time in meeting time. Our coaches did such a good job of setting our players up for practice and for meetings that our players responded because they knew exactly what they needed to do in detail," Montgomery said, "Now the challenge comes when you get into a season and time is more crunched and you've got to practice every single day and if we can continue to do that. So that's my challenge to the coaches and our challenge for the players."
Two quarterbacks have stood above the others in Minnesota transfer Philip Nelson and Kurt Benkert who missed last season with an ACL tear. Montgomery says that competition will continue. He doesn't appear to be in any hurry to name a starter, but at the same time it could still happen at any time.
"They're both playing well. One of them will have a bad play and the other will have a bad play. Then one will have a good play and the other will come back and match it. I'm interested in seeing what the tape will show but they also have a big time opportunity this weekend to separate themselves from each other. Who knows what tomorrow brings. If people separate themselves, we can all see. Right now they're where they are because they played at a bigh level. It's a competition, so we could name it then, we could name it fifteen days later or we could name it at any point where we get to when it's time to name it, so we're looking forward to the competition."
PirateIllustrated.com was on hand for Wednesday's practice to bring you PI Photos and post practice interviews including Coach Mo's recap of how it all went. Stay up to date in the links below and additional stories on the way as PI spring camp coverage continues.
