Like many other football coaches around the Teche Area, Westgate coach Ryan Antoine and his Tiger football team had to deal with weather, injury, illness and missing players as spring football started about a month ago.

But unlike many Teche Area coaches, Antoine has a number of returning starters from last season’s team that reached the second round of the Class 4A playoffs.

“We have 18 starters back from last year and we have a lot of guys coming off of injuries,” Antoine said. “We didn’t want to do a full spring with our guys. We did a couple of OTA-type things after school so we were concentrating on getting faster and stronger.”

The NFL runs Organized Team Activities as part of their offseason program, where players go through practices but without coaches running the show.

That’s the basic idea of what the Tigers did over the spring. Antoine and his assistant coaches were conducting the drills to ensure player safety but the principle of letting players go through workouts and practices was the plan for the spring.

Since Westgate didn’t have an official spring football session, Antoine will take advantage of the extra week that is available when fall camp starts for teams that didn’t have a spring.

Antoine and company did take advantage of the LHSAA calendar that allowed summer workouts to start in May.

“Since we didn’t get out of school until June 4, we were able to use that two weeks period at the start of summer workouts when we were able to practice after school,” Antoine said.

“This is the first time that I’ve done something like this. But with an experienced ball club coming back, I decided to do something different this year. If I didn’t have as experienced a football team, I might have done a traditional spring football period.”

Antoine added that because he has a strong, senior-laden team, he was comfortable with players leading the workouts during the start of summer;

“It was also a chance to see our younger players while our seniors healed up from surgeries and other illnesses so we can have a strong, healthy team come fall,” Antoine said.

After school ended, Antoine gave his team a little break and return to the practice fields for more summer workouts starting Monday.

“I think that week in the fall is going to be helpful for us,” the WHS coach said. “We normally do our lock-in with the players before we go out in pads and this year we’ll be able to do our lock-in with pads.”

And with only having the replace four starters, Antoine knows that this fall’s team has a chance to be special.

“We have the chance with an experienced team to really look at who we want in backup roles and some freshmen that we think we can play,” Antoine said.

“It’s a benefit that will really help us come fall.”