The Quad

Issue date: 4/23/07 Section: Sports

This is an exciting time of year for the West Chester Golden Ram football team. Spring practice is coming to an end, and the annual Purple and Gold game is this Thursday at 6 p.m. at Farrell Stadium.

Head Coach Bill Zwaan's team is coming off a Lambert Trophy winning season as the top team in the northeast region of Division II football, and has high expectations once again this season.

Zwaan appeared as a guest on my radio show last Saturday to discuss the current state of his team as well as his thoughts on the upcoming season.

Quad: Coach, could you talk a little about how this team is progressing in spring practice?

Bill Zwaan: We've actually had a pretty good spring practice, we've had a couple kids who are hurt who aren't involved in spring practice for one reason or another, and that's been good for some of our backup kids to step up and play and they're getting a lot more reps and they're really getting the job done, in some ways, the kids who haven't been practicing have opened up the door for us to look at other guys who have been practicing and we have so many returning players to this team that know how to practice and know what we want out of practice and they've really had a good spring.

Q: Have there been any injuries of note?

BZ: Nothing that's going to carry over into the fall but we have a few guys who haven't been able to practice at all during the spring, Michael Washington got hurt in winter workouts, just a bruised foot but we're keeping him out of spring just as a precaution Brian Paulson our starting TE got hurt in Intramural basketball, and he's practiced a little bit but can't hit and he's just running some rounds that kind of thing. Tyler Downs got hurt not on the field but off the field and he hasn't practiced, we have a couple guys not practicing because of injuries but we should be fine come fall.

Q: You were fortunate enough to net a recruiting class that was very talented on both sides of the ball, could talk about those players and how you see them gelling with the returning veterans you have on the roster?

BZ: None of the freshman are here yet, we haven't really gotten a look at them yet, but some of them have come up to watch practice and they'll all be here for our spring game on Thursday, but we are probably going to be one or two of those guys we may look at, at certain positions, they might be able to help us, we might look at one of the young guys at the corner, including the defensive backs and wideouts, some tremendously fast kids with some size who we think that if we put them in a position that doesn't take a whole lot of learning, such as corner, we might be able to use some of those kids earlier in their career, we may see Jarred Eaton from Abington or one of the other guys we brought in who you might see right away. The one thing we did in recruiting is brought in a tremendous offensive line class, because our offensive line is all older and they will be graduating soon, and we think we really hit the mother load with that group.

Continued...

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