Staff photo / Preston Byers A Poland Bulldogs player runs with the ball at an offseason practice during the summer.

In a week, the Mahoning Valley high school football season will begin.

After months of offseason conditioning workouts and a few weeks worth of official practices, nearly a dozen local teams will take the field for the first time this year on Thursday, Aug. 22.

Among the first teams to suit up for an official game in 2024 is Warren G. Harding, led by first-year head coach Matt Richardson. But Richardson said the Raiders are not looking ahead to Canton McKinley, their Week 1 opponent, but instead are focused on Painesville Riverside, their final scrimmage opponent.

“We haven’t even thought about Week 1 yet,” Richardson said, “because we’re trying to get better today, and then we’re going to try to improve in our scrimmage.”

For the past few weeks, Harding, like many football teams around the area, have been conducting two-a-days.

Richardson said the grueling two-practice-per-day schedule is designed, in part, to prepare the team for the schedule the players will face when school begins next week.

“If you participated in two-a-days from 7:30 to 2 o’clock, I see no issue with you going to school from 7:30 to 2. Nothing’s changed,” Richardson said. “They did a great job with transitioning to that.”

This week also served as a change in schedule for the Raiders, who began practicing in the afternoon in an attempt to acclimate players to what their routine will be for the rest of the season.

Similarly, Canfield began “doubles” on Aug. 1, the official start date for football practice in Ohio, and are beginning to shift its practice schedule. The Cardinals, like Harding, will be led by a head coach entering his first season at the helm.

Joe Ignazio, the successor to longtime Canfield coach Mike Pavlansky, is not a stranger to the team or the system in place, though.

“I’ve been around the program, so I’m already familiar with the kids, and I ran the offseason program for strength and conditioning,” said Ignazio, who previously served as Boardman’s head coach for eight years before becoming an assistant for Pavlansky.

“I just got a lot more responsibility real quick. So from that standpoint, there’s some things I haven’t had to do in a while as an assistant and I’m knocking the rust off some of those things.”

Ignazio said the start of school will present the team with “adversity,” but he expects it will not be an issue for the Cardinals.

And like Richardson, Ignazio said his team has its sights set on a scrimmage with Struthers today, but some attention is being paid to season-opening foe West Branch.

“We certainly have an eye on our Week 1 opponent… So we definitely have those conversations and start a little bit earlier on preparation since they’re Week 1. We don’t tend to spend a whole lot of time on our second scrimmage opponent, [we] kind of watch some film and review some stuff so that we’re sound in our scrimmage for what we want to do and accomplish. But then we’ve already started working and preparing for Week 1.”

Considering teams only have a few weeks of being in full pads before the first games of the season, scrimmages serve as great learning experiences for players and coaches alike.

“That’ll be a good test for us to see what we need to do, where guys fit in, roles and things we need to tweak systematically,” said Hubbard head coach Brian Hoffman shortly after official practices began. “We’re at that point, once you have a chance to see yourself tested against somebody else, that kind of helps us as coaches in decision-making and things that we need to do better.”

Poland head coach Tom Pavlansky, who has a relatively young group of Bulldogs this season, also said scrimmages and practices in early August can be instrumental for a team.

“We’re learning more and more about the guys, which is what we need to do,” Pavlansky said after the first week of practice. “We’re trying to put them in situations where we can find out, get some answers as to what they can do, what they can’t do.”

However great the practice or scrimmage, though, the most effective time and place to answer those questions will be under the lights in one week.

Have an interesting story? Contact Preston Byers by email at pbyers@tribtoday.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @PresByers.