The building blocks for Paul Killinger’s Hingham High football team begin way before a whistle is blown or a point is recorded on the scoreboard for the 2011 season.
Coming off a 6-5 record where a nine-win season was well within their grasp, Killinger and the Harbormen got back to work this August trying to erase some of the bad memories of some narrow margins of defeat last season.
“My opening statement was that I’m glad the season is starting now just to forget some of the aggravation of last year,” Killinger said. “We lost three games that I felt we should have won last year, which would have won us the league title. That’s on us. That’s nobodies fault but ours."
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Killinger is starting to build the base of the season in training camp this season by making sure the players’ conditioning is up to par so late game mishaps or mistakes don’t creep in, similar to the 26-20 loss to Scituate on Thanksgiving of last year when the Harbormen had a 20-point lead at one point in the game.
“They are real important, especially if you can get through them,” Killinger said of the first couple days of practice and the upcoming two-a-day schedule. “If you get through them, then you get the conditioning part of it in, so when we put on pad they aren’t slowing down too much. It’s real important.
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“When you are tired and you start getting lazy mentally, you start to fight through that and you condition yourself not to succumb to being tired and feeling sorry for yourself. It’s very important to build that mental toughness and the attitude you want to set for the rest of the season. If you don’t get it now you will never get it later.”
Killinger is hoping that the recent success of the younger teams in his program will start paying dividends at some point during the season this year.
Reed McLeod is back as a two-way player, and he will be pivotal for the Harbormen at the quarterback position to bring leadership on and off the field. Tim Schlosky will lead the defensive unit as a linebacker, and Kevin McCarthy and Robert Murray will be two other two-way players for Killinger this season.
Sophomores Hunter Brown and Tucker Smith and junior Liam Koenen will have to bring some of that youthful energy as well.
“We are young and we aren’t real big, but we are athletic,” said Killinger. “We are athletic and we are talented and hopefully we’ve got a good work ethic and we’ll get it done.”
All the more reason why the base needs to be in place for a successful run this season.
