BUIES CREEK, N.C. - The Campbell football team kept working toward the start of the 2010 season with the team's first practice in full pads on Wednesday morning, Aug. 11, at the team's grass practice facility.

The team started the day with a drill called "guts". The drill consists of three offensive blockers and a running back against three defensive players in a designed boundary area. The offensive players are attempting to block the defensive players to allow the running back to get to the open field and score. The defensive players are attempting to prevent this from happening and want to stop the offense from scoring.

The team continued with practice and worked on individual drills by position all over the football field. The defensive backs worked on form tackling, blitzing and reading the ball as the quarterback pointed to one or the other side of the field. The linebacker worked on footwork and ball drills. The wide receivers worked on their blocking and coming back to meet the ball after it was thrown. The quarterbacks had footwork drills and situations. The defensive line worked on shedding blocks and getting through potential double teams. The running backs had drills on keeping a lower center of gravity through the line of scrimmage. The offensive line had footwork drills and exploding into their blocks at the line of scrimmage.

Other areas the team worked on during the two-hour session were offensive and defensive play calls with the first and second teams working against each other. The team also went through punt coverage, punt block and punt returns.

Directly before the team's conditioning session, the team had a light hitting situational scrimmage where the first and second team offense squared off with the first and second team defense. Among the highlights of the situational controlled outing was junior receiver Paul Constantine hauling in a 40-yard pass from Daniel Polk and redshirt junior tight end Josh Owens' 17-yard reception down the field.

"Well, we got on all the pads for the first time and really started to play the game of football," head coach Dale Steele explained "We did some very good things today, but there are still some areas that I saw that we need to improve in. One of those things is the continued development of our younger players. Our older players executed fairly well and got in the right spots consistently. Some of our younger players still don't have this element figured out yet. What we've got to do as a coaching staff and as a team is begin to bring our younger guys up to speed. We didn't introduce too many new elements today. As we transitioned to wearing full pads, we attempted to keep the team mentally fresh and not add many new drills or plays. We did add a few new elements in the kicking game including some situations that we don't normally work on though. Today we just continued with the installation of the offense and the defense at a steady pace to make sure we are getting everything in before moving forward. I liked the competiveness I saw in the team today. During our three-on-three drills we saw a lot of more competition and the extension of plays than we had earlier in the camp. Both sides of the football showed the ability to play at a high level. Our problem is that we need to be consistent throughout. In many drills it was a give and take between the offense and defense. Ideally that is always the way you want it to be."

Campbell's football team practices again tomorrow morning, Aug. 12, starting at 8:50 a.m. in full pads for the first day of two-a-days. The team's second practice will be a night session starting at 6 p.m. in shoulder pads.