The Warrenton Warriors are wrapping up their high school football camp this week with an optimistic outlook for the upcoming season. 

Warrenton had it’s annual high school football camp over the past two weeks. The first day of the camp was July 10. The camp wraps up July 21. 

Warrenton Head Football Coach Jason Koper said Warrenton’s focus over the two-week camp was to master their foundational football knowledge. They worked on their technique and tried to get the players ready to go with their playbook and the changes they made for this season. 

“We’ve got the best skill that I’ve coached so far at Warrenton in my opinion,” Koper said. “And so we’ve had to change up the playbook in a good way to be able to meet our needs.”  

The Warriors recently switched to a heavy July schedule for their contact days, which Koper believes will help Warrenton be game ready earlier  this upcoming season than in past seasons. 

“We switched to this heavy July mindset this year,” Koper said. “Just because of us going into June for school, it just seemed to be easier for us to get our contact days heavy in July. So trying it out and hopefully we see the results in August.”

While the Warriors’ work this summer has been good, Koper said the offseason work was great. He said their numbers are the best since he has been at Warrenton. They expect a roster size in the mid-70s for the upcoming season. 

“Just the weight room effort, it was unbelievable,” Koper said. “Our size, our strength has all come so far. Now that we’re getting on the field, the guys are starting to feel it and see how much of an impact the weight room’s had. So very excited for what we’ve seen so far.” 

With the strong roster size, there has been competition across the board. Koper said they have depth and competition at many positions this season. They are far from determining all of their starting positions, Koper said. 

While the Warriors will again feature a low number of seniors, they return a large number of varsity contributors. They have multiple juniors who have multiple years of varsity playing experience and are battle tested, Koper said. 

“They’re juniors by age but experience, they’re already seeing a lot of varsity games,” Koper said. “They made that comment this year that the speed’s so much slower now because they’ve already been there and done it. So it’s good for our program that we’ve got so many young guys that have played varsity for so long and are now experienced veterans.”

Koper thinks the Warriors are much further already this summer than they were at the same point last season. With the Warriors bringing back multiple players with varsity experience, the focus over summer camp is on fine tuning and game prep. 

“We feel like because we have so much more experience this year, we’re like week nine, week six already,” Koper said. “Just with our knowledge. When we started getting on the field, we didn’t have to reteach the playbook. The playbooks’s already there. So we were just fine tuning this and it feels like we’re in game prep already versus actual summer camp.” 

Warrenton is set to begin fall practice in early August.