After the head football coaching job opened up at Northeast, a leader was needed to develop a young team into a competitive program. Mike Jalazo was hired for the job. Last season, in his first year as the Viking head football coach, his team finished just under .500 with crucial injuries to key players such as Jalen Hubbard and promising freshman Ryan Davis. However, Jalazo likes what the future holds.
OFF SEASON
Jalazo credits 7 on 7 for some of the development of his young team. As the summer continues to get busier and busier with football activities, what 7 on 7 provides can be very beneficial to a football team.
Mike Jalazo: Off-season went pretty well… starting with 7 on 7. If it wasn’t for us having to do a bunch of coaching classes, we would have done the whole circuit on 7 on 7. We did it in the spring and late in the summer. We didn’t do yours (9 Route) because we had already committed to the one in Largo and we weren’t sure if we wanted to go 3 days in a row, so we didn’t do any 7 on 7’s for about a month.
YOUTH
The majority of the Tampa Bay teams are very young, including Northeast. You can count on one hand how many seniors the Vikings have on the roster.
Mike Jalazo: But we’re young; when we look at the 20 guys that we’ve got on defense, Auggie [Sanchez] is the only rising senior that we’ve got. We only have 5 seniors period on the football team and when you look beyond it, you see kids like Dontario Fowler and Keith Harrington. Ryan Davis is going to be a sophomore and the other two are juniors. When you go up and down our roster, a lot of interest from what we did in the spring … so when you start looking at our skill guys, we’ve got a little bit of depth and we’ve got a lot of speed and we’re young. Auggie [Sanchez] is the only skill guy who is going to be a rising senior so that part of it was kind of neat.
UP FRONT
On the other side, Jalazo is really trying to define the line on both sides of the ball. He has a pretty good idea of what they are doing defensively. Offensively, it’s a different story.
Mike Jalazo: We’ve got a little bit out there… one or two that will help us, so we’ve got some depth up front but we don’t have a lot of experience up front. And really the focus for me, as the head coach, is working with my line coach and working with the line to pick our top 7 or 8 guys that we can really narrow down to a 5 man starting group and have a little depth there. I think that if we are decent up front, based on everything that I’ve seen since May, if we’re decent up front, then we’ll be competitive. We can’t not be competitive. There’s too much talent in the skill position to not be competitive. But, we still have to develop up front. Other than Bob Wiener, every other coach that I’ve talked to seems to have the same kind of issue with developing their lineman. So we’ll see.