The Sealy Tiger Youth Football Camp wrapped things up late last week, handing out t-shirts and jerseys on top of the certificates everyone got for the hard work they put in throughout the workouts.

The 97 participants got to run through the same drills the high school boys do on the same fields with the same coaches they will eventually work up toward learning under soon enough.

Head varsity football coach Shane Mobley included that knowledge and base familiarity helps out all the campers but most importantly those going into their freshman year this year.

“For our freshmen, it just puts them so much further ahead to spend four days out there because they do so much,” Mobley said. “We treat it like practice as far as terminology and specific drills so they’re a little bit further ahead and for some of them it’s just knocking out the cobwebs but the older ones get a little more advanced.”

This class of incoming sixth- through ninth-graders took advantage of the time they had with the coaches although theirs was a larger group Mobley and staff has seen before.

“We had 97 kids, that’s probably 15-20 more kids than we had,” he said. “It’s gotten bigger and bigger each year and the biggest turnout was in the older kids and that’s always a great sign.”

Those older kids got to work with the rest of their high school counterparts Monday morning for the start of camp, the official start of the 2019 season.