Shawano Community High School football coach Al Tomow spent this week guiding his second Shawano Hawks Youth Football camp, running 33 fourth- through eighth-graders through drills designed to build their skills.
Tomow hopes the work, ultimately, will pay off for the Hawks’ football program.
“We put an emphasis on trying to build a strong tradition,” Tomow said. “It starts with our kids helping out the younger kids, trying to instill a sense of pride in them. We’re all Hawks, whether you’re in fourth grade, fifth grade. Eventually, we’re all wearing the same high school jerseys.”
Tomow had about 20 current and former SCHS varsity players helping out over the four days of the camp.
“We had a lot of our guys help out,” he said. “Even some kids that graduated came back to help.”
The camp was split in half, with the first and third days focused on offense and the second and fourth day on defense.
“The first two days we worked on a lot of fundamentals and the technique part of it,” Tomow said. “The next two days we kind of let them apply those skills by setting up skill challenges. We let them see what they had learned and compete a little bit with each other.”
Tomow said the camp was helped by great weather.
“The weather was a lot cooler (than last year),” he said. “We were able to move things on and teach them a little bit more.”
The high school Hawks, who had contact days the first week of July, will spend four days at a team camp starting Sunday at Winona State University in Minnesota.
Tomow, a SCHS graduate who played football at Winona State, hopes to make the camp a regular part of his team’s offseason.
“It was big when I was in high school,” Tomow said. “The coach took some guys down there. Seeing as I graduated from there, and some of the coaches that are there are my former teammates, we thought it was going to be a lot of fun.”
Tomow was surprised by the interest his players expressed in the camp.
“We put it out there for the kids, expecting to get about 20 kids,” he said. “We ended up with 35 kids signed up.”
Tomow said the offseason work is also designed to help his players with heat acclimatization, which the WIAA has focused on after passing new rules this year.
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