RIVERSIDE

One hot afternoon last week, a loud voice echoed around the back practice field at Highland High School.

It was the last day of summer football camp.

That meant ice cream and football. Incoming freshmen and junior high kids huddled it up with Highland Huskie varsity players.

Cheers erupted when a camper made a Gronk-like catch in a would-be end zone in a would-be game.

The encouraging voice intervened again. The voice belonged to Cory Quail, who is entering his second season as the Huskies head coach and whose enthusiasm is simply contagious.

If you want to get pumped up for a new football season, just spend a few minutes with Quail.

“We’re excited. We think we have a very bright future,” he said. “The biggest thing is, I love my kids. I really do. It’s a group that I love being around.”

Once the football was done last week, it was off to the weight room.

Oh, the weights.

The Huskies began preseason practice Monday, the same day most other teams greeted the fall sports season all across Iowa. But, really, the Huskies have been aiming at this week for months.

“We’ve been excited since March,” Quail said. “We started changing some things up with the weight room and just getting things ready for when we hit the summer. I’m not gonna lie, there’s been blood pumping through that heart for a long time.”

Clearly, that is obvious on the back field at Highland.

Don’t be misled by a rough 2022 season in which the Huskies, a Class A team with a downsized roster size following the graduation of a large senior group in spring 2022, didn’t win a game. They lost their first two games to football powers East Buchanan and Columbus by a combined 109-0.

Quail spent the spring coaching Highland’s boys track team and getting ready for this moment. And he’s not the type of guy standing off to the side writing on a clipboard and adjusting his visor; he’s bouncing all over the field, encouraging, instructing, motivating.

No silence here.

“I’m an intense person,” he says. “I got to have a lot of kids in track that I didn’t get to build a relationship through another avenue, that I thought really was awesome for the year. I really loved coaching it. We didn’t have high numbers and maybe didn’t have the type of success everybody wanted to have, but, man, I really loved the relationship building we got out of that. I loved being able to spend time with kids that I didn’t have a chance to get to know before.”

Football will be an extension of that.

It started in the weight room. Three times a week. All summer. And, really, before then.

“Getting that weight room culture, getting the kids to understand that not only is that something where you get bigger, faster and stronger,” Quail said, “but we can prevent injury for you so if we do have low numbers, we can keep consistency on the field. We can keep accountability.”

Quail and other Huskie coaches are already seeing the change.

“We were talking about how it’s starting to transition from us coaches having to tell them what to do and how to do things, not just lifting but also leading. And now it’s the kids seeing that routine, understanding it and starting to take ownership of it.”

And it’s not just the guys from the football team.

“Having the guys and girls working together, I think once they got to the comfort level of it, and then the guys recognizing like, the girls are challenging,” Quail said.

“They’re doing some things better than us. They’re kicking our butts.”

“I think that speaks to your culture,” Quail added. “It speaks to your level of support and trust, and it speaks to that building an environment.”

For Quail, this is all about culture and accountability. And building. And speed. Never a quiet moment.

Soon, there’ll be football. The Huskies will open their season at home against North Cedar on August 25. They don’t play Columbus, a state quarterfinalist last year, until Week 5. They don’t play Alburnett, the unbeaten District 5 champion a year ago, at all.

“Our schedule this year, we think it allows us to be more competitive,” Quail said. “We want to be competitive first and foremost, trust our fundamentals, trust each other, control what we can control and that will take care of the wins and losses.”

Once the games begin, it won’t be difficult to find the head coach. He’ll be the one bouncing up and down the sidelines, shouting the whole time. It’s the energy.

“I love seeing these guys grow,” Quail said. “I love seeing where we’re going. I love seeing the kids coming up through the program that we’re building from our feeder system. It’s football.”

And it’s time.

News columnist Paul Bowker can be reached at bowkerpaul1@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @bowkerpaul