ECU Ready For First Scrimmage Saturday in Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium

ECU has completed seven practices on the way to an early September start to this year’s football season. One of the major building blocks to evaluating this year’s team are a pair of scrimmage that will occur during preseason camp.

With the first scrimmage of this year’s ECU fall football camp coming up in mid-morning on Saturday, third year ECU head coach Scottie Montgomery wants to see his veteran players take what they have learned over the course of time and parlay that experience into a solid effort.

"I want to see our old people play penalty free, assignment correct offense, defense and special teams and I want to see our young people make plays," said Montgomery.

There is a large group of younger players on this year’s roster who Montgomery hopes will continue their maturation process and turn in as clean a performance in Saturday’s scrimmage and practice as humanly possible.

"We're trying to get our young people ready to play and we've done a good job at this point of trying to get them ready to play in these games. I don't want them being out there like robots,” Montgomery said, “There are going to be some bad mistakes that happen and we're going to move on from it, but we've recruited some play makers and I told these coaches don't coach the playmaker out of them."

So far ECU has conducted a very solid camp. It has been a period where they have been able to evaluate talent and which players they feel are beginning to step up.

Much of the job of getting the most out of the experienced guys falls on the coaching staff to prod them in the right direction. Montgomery knows that and he doesn’t plan to just let whatever happens just happen. He expects some busts from the younger guys but hopes to put the emphasis on some of the things they do right so as to continue to instill confidence.

"Sometimes when you don't grade out at 95 percent you feel bad. Well I'm going to do a good job of making sure that we hold great players accountable to consistency and young player we're going to reward them for great plays."

PirateIllustrated.com will be there on Saturday to bring you post-scrimmage coverage from Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium. Stay tuned for more as ECU fall camp coverage for our thirteenth season continues here on PI.