By Jeremy McDonald

Jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com

SALEM, Ore.–  For the second year now, the Willamette University Football Team has put on what is known as the ‘Lineman Camp’.

Offensive and defensive lineman from around the State of Oregon, and a few from out of State, have converged onto McCulloch Stadium for the three-day camp that started on July 12.

For Camp Director and Bearcat Offensive Line Coach Bobby Johnson, he’s drawing in personal experiences from his playing days for the camp.

“Most of the drills I do are from what I was taught as a player and going to clinics and learning from Coach (Glen) Fowles here,” said Johnson.  “Coach Fowles is probably one of the better O-Line guys in the country.  So to learn from him, it’s a combination of what I learned as a player and what I’ve studied as a coach and learning from my boss now.”

Those experiences have incorporated themselves in this camp that focus’ on more technique than trying to out-man the other guy in front of you. And for Johnson he knows that these lessons for the athletes and their coaches could be carried over to when they go back to their high school fields.

“This is so technique-based, it’s not a camp where it’s about beating guys up, it’s really good technique,” said Johnson.  “I mean it’s huge for these guys because now they can go back to their High Schools, their High School coaches are here, (so) they can go back to their High Schools with some better technique and teach the other guys at their high school so these camps are huge.”

The athlete’s, like South Salem’s Tyler Coates and Dallas’ Carson Unger, camps like the one that Willamette is hosting doesn’t just give them looks, but it’ll give them some extra information about playing in the trenches that they may not have normally got.

“It’s very important,” said Coates. “Our team’s going to rely on the offensive line and by just going to practices for when we have our team, it’s not going to be enough.  Coming to these schools, we brought about four offensive lineman so, (we’re) coming together, not just individually but all of us together getting new information from different coaches.”

For Unger and Dallas from the 5A level, getting to play against schools like McNary, South Salem gives them different looks before they enter two-a-days next month while building that good sportsmanship in the process amongst themselves as a unit.

“It helps be friendly with teammates, it helps with sportsmanship,” said Unger about playing together during this camp.

“Those schools are bigger schools, (so) it shows how good I am and how good other people are in smaller schools because they’re bigger and normally bigger schools have better players, so then it shows what we can do against good players,” Unger said about playing against different competition like McNary and South.

As camp ends for the day with some ‘Pods’ work, two-offensive lineman versus one defensive lineman, Johnson likes how this camp has progress and hopes to see the camp continue to grow in the future.

“This has been great, we hope we can grow the camp,” said Johnson.  “We’re 65 deep this year and we’ll love to be at 100 next year.  We love to more local schools here.

“Like I said I think this is the best technique camp I’ve ever been at and Coach Fowles has done a really good job stressing to us as a coaching staff, ‘hey this is not about banging each other up, it’s about really teaching these guys really good technique offensively and defensively’.”

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