Walking through the halls of NHS on a Friday during football season, you can easily tell who is a player. Not because of the jersey, but because of the little skip each player does, the pep in the step you wouldn’t have noticed the prior four days of the school week. The small smile on their faces as they countdown the hours, minutes, seconds until they are in their uniforms, in their pads and on the field.

    The Noblesville Millers kick off the season at Lawrence North and coaches are feeling confident at the boys’ preparation against LN tactics.

    “We are trying to prepare the kids for the specific offense of Lawrence North,” defense coach Chris Radican said. “They run a very unique offense. It’s real assignment specific, there’s not a lot of teams who run it.”

    Lawrence North uses a certain kind of offense called a “Wing T” offense which is a first run offense that utilizes pulling and trapping the lineman.

    The football team doesn’t only have on-the-field assignments with whom they watch or what plays they have to know in that instant. [The players] have quizzes over the plays along with studying records of the plays.

    “We have to retrain our kids to focus on the players and not necessarily the ball,” Radican said.

    Since Lawrence North has an uncommon offense, Noblesville has learned to devise a plan called eye discipline which helps players figure out what LN might do.

    “You have to know opponent, how they line up, what they like to do at a certain lineaments so we have to prepare our kids for that,” head coach Jason Simmons said. “We are training eye discipline because Lawrence North does a lot of different things with personnel, motions and different people. We are trying to make sure we can recognize those important keys going into a game.”

    However, game week isn’t just about what the players have to do but, it’s what they get to do. They get to play against people who aren’t their friends.

   “Going against another school is really different because when you go against your own team, your own friends, you have the feeling that you don’t want to hit as hard as you normally would because you don’t want to hurt someone,” junior Thomas Carroll said. “Once you’re going against a different school, it doesn’t matter how hard you hit. You can go all out because you don’t care what happens to them as much as you would your own teammate.”

    All in all, it’s game week. Friday nights under the bright lights. It’s here. Football season is here.