Spring football: Navarre starting over with new cast

By TRAVIS DOWNEY

travisd@nwfdailynews.com

NAVARRE - Michael Pettus felt lost.

A rising junior on the Navarre football team, Pettus found himself feeling every bit the part of a wide-eyed freshman earlier this month when the Raiders held their first spring practice under first-year coach Chad Lashley.

"Everything was over my head," Pettus recalled with a chuckle. "I was confused and just running around trying to get where I was supposed to be.

"It was just boom, boom, boom, boom - real fast."

Rising senior linebacker Walter Hill was also caught off guard by the frantic pace of a Lashley-led practice.

"It was tough," Hill said. "I wasn't expecting that - not the first day."

Indeed, a Navarre practice under Lashley has the feel of a fire drill, with players and coaches alike moving into and out of periods in a race against time.

For Lashley, who takes over the reigns of the Raider program after serving as Navarre's offensive coordinator the past three seasons,  everything done during practice - even the tempo with which things are done - is calculated..

For a program coming off back-to-back 7-4 seasons - each of which led to playoff berths - and a coach looking to make a mark of his own, there is no time to remain in the past.

"We don't talk about last year," Lashley said. "We try not to talk about the past, it's, ‘What do we have to do now to be excellent?'"

The question is a rhetorical one for Lashley, who only needs to look at the Raiders' offensive depth chart for a reminder of the job ahead of him.

Gone is quarterback Austin Grimm, who in two seasons passed for more than 4,000  yards and guided the Raiders to the program's first two postseason appearances.

Gone also are two of the school's three leading receivers in Chris Weaver and Kyle Irby.

"We're replacing everything," Lashley said. "We're starting over."

After spending the past three years concerned only with putting as many points on the scoreboard as possible, Lashley himself is starting over.

"My whole thought process has changed from being as wide-open as we can be offensviely to not putting our defense in a bad situation," Lashley said. "We want to play great defense and opportunistic offense."

And while the Raiders will open the 2008 season still expecting to make a return to the playoffs, Lashley, who credited former coach Larry Olson for helping make what has been a "smooth" transition, is undaunted by any outside pressures.

For the Raiders' new coach, the greatest motivator is the pressure from within.

 "The biggest pressure anybody is going to put on me," he said, "is the pressure I put on myself."