Panthers show improvement against Lake Arthur

Published 1:00 am Sunday, August 25, 2019

If Friday’s Iberia Parish Sugar Cane Jamboree contest against Highland Baptist is the dress rehearsal for the regular season, Delcambre’s scrimmage against Lake Arthur at NISH showed head football coach Artie Liuzza that his team is almost ready for their prime time debut….they just need a little more work.

“This was a very physical team that we scrimmaged tonight and what I saw was the our guys are learning a new system on defense,” Liuzza said. “This was the first real chance we had to go live against a varsity squad.

“We’ve just been going against our scout team. There’s a lot of things to fix on film. That’s what a scrimmage is, it’s a practice against another team to get things on film to learn and get better.”

Against a team that won six games last year and went to the first round of the Class 2A playoffs, Delcambre has some offensive success and some defensive success, but couldn’t sustain those successes against a team that is expected to again to be a playoff team in Class 2A.

Lake Arther scored twice with the junior varsity team and two more times with their varsity squad and held the Panthers scoreless in the two-hour scrimmage.

“I think the biggest thing on offense was the fact that we fumbled some snaps,” Liuzza said. “Some of that has to do with the weather but we have to correct that. If we don’t fumble snaps then I think that we could have sustained some drives.”

Parker Nunez had some good runs for the Panthers while Jamian Guy had a couple of long runs and just missed out on getting into the endzone as he was tackled at the last minute by some Lake Arthur defenders.

Despite being chased by the Lake Arthur defensive line, Delcambre quarterback Caleb Moneaux was able to get off some good throws to the receivers.

Defensively, the visiting Tigers were able to gash the Delcambre defense for some big plays.

“Yeah, they did and that’s something that we’re going to have to correct moving forward,“ Liuzza said. “We had some guys out of position a little bit here and there.

“But this offense that we faced tonight is an offense that we’re not going to see against for 10 weeks so it’s not like we spend a lot of time on defending that.”

Liuzza added that Lake Arthur has a good offense and you really don’t go into a scrimmage doing a lot of game-planning, a team comes into a scrimmage working on its offense and defense to see just where the team is so a coaching staff has something to make adjustments off of.

The first-year Delcambre coach saw some things that his teams needs to work on as the Panthers prepare for the jamboree game against Highland Baptist and the opening week contest om the road against Westminster Christian.

“We need to work on assignment football on defense,” he said. 

“We need to work on running to our spots, running hard, filling the gaps that we are supposed to by filling.

“I thought at times we did that and we did it well but we need to be more consistent with it,

“Offensively, we just need to be consistent executing. 

“Like I said, our fumbled snaps were the biggest thing for us. 

“I like some things that I saw out of our passing game and we need to be able to continue doing that.”