North Carolina State University Athletics
Annabelle Vaughan's Preseason Diary - First Scrimmage
8/16/2004 12:00:00 AM | Football
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Aug. 16, 2004
FINALLY! After being frustrated by Charley for a couple of days, the Wolfpack was finally able to hold its first preseason scrimmage on Monday afternoon. I believe if the players or the coaches had been told they had to wait five more minutes, they would have gone berserk! Actually, despite all the bad weather, they only ended up missing one practice this weekend. They got the kicking scrimmage in on Saturday morning and then were off as scheduled on Sunday (the team went to church together and had some meetings). The team met with Coach Amato in the lockerroom at 2:45 and then they came out and flexed on the field. The field looked as beautiful as I've ever seen it before they got started - the brightest green without a single flaw. After flex, they broke into individual drills for a couple of periods and the worked on special teams before the main scrimmage began. Instead of having to pipe in crowd noise for the scrimmage, we had the sounds of hammers and machinery coming from the press box. I think I heard the "beep-beep" of a truck backing up about every five seconds! Today's scrimmage was closed - and we're not releasing statistics to the media, but I will mention that John McCargo had an unbelievable day. He had four tackles for loss, a sack and two caused fumbles ... before the break! In the second part, he picked up another fumble and ran it down to the one yardline before he was manhandled to the ground by Marcus Stone. There were some good throws by both quarterbacks and some good catches by a wide variety of wide receivers. It was great to see Sterling Hicks make a couple of really tough catches and Brian Clark also had a couple of nice ones. The running back corps was a little skimpy - T.A. McLendon and Reggie Davis continued to sit out with hamstring pulls and Darrell Blackman is still getting over a quad pull on Thursday. T.J. Williams is also still sitting out. Bobby Washington got a lot of work and so did Eric Taylor and Chauncey Graham. John Deraney looked good kicking the ball - he nailed a couple of 38 yard field goals and a 53-yarder. Josh Brown was back with us today - he's decided that for now, he's not going to play, but he is going to work with the team and try to "help out any way I can." The scrimmage was mostly situational - with overtime and goalline drills at the end. The defense dominated the goalline drills, although Bobby Washington scored twice late in the drill. Coach Amato said afterwards that defense is supposed to dominate on the goalline, and that definitely happened today.
