By RYAN ARENA
L’Observateur

LAPLACE – As Riverside gets set to take on St. Thomas Aquinas in a preseason scrimmage today (6 p.m. at Strawberry Stadium in Hammond), coach Bill Stubbs hopes to learn how deep his team will be this season, and plans on giving a number of different players a chance to make an impression.
“We’d like to play as many kids as we can here. It’s a, ‘The more, the merrier,’ mentality,” he said. “But at the same time, you don’t want to see a huge fall off (during the scrimmage). We’ll see as we go along.”
The Rebels have made some offensive tweaks, adding more pistol and zone-read aspects to the playbook, while defensively, the team is looking to expand on the improvement it showed late last season.
“I wouldn’t say we’ve revamped anything (defensively),” said Stubbs. “We’ve taken a full year of installation. You can put a bunch of things in, but if you can’t execute it, you’d better not run it. We’ve got some kids back now that have been in our system, on both sides of the ball.”
As such, he said that his priorities in the scrimmage would be seeing proper execution and aggressiveness against the first live opponent the Rebels have had this offseason. Riverside played an intrasquad spring game.
“I’ve seen some flashes of aggressive play from our guys, but I need to see it on a consistent basis,” said Stubbs. “I need to see the fire from them.’
“We need to see our backs make the right reads, our receivers to run precise, crisp routes … the way we’ve coached the defense, I don’t think there will really be a while lot of difference in the kinds of fronts we’ll see. We’ve been playing against ourselves, but now, even with a new opponent, it’s gonna come down to playing assignment football.”
St. Thomas brings back 26 seniors, giving the Rebels an experienced foe to test their mettle against.
“They’ve pretty much got everyone back,” said Stubbs. “They’re feeling real good about their football team. I think it’ll be a good matchup.”
Riverside was dealt a blow this week when offensive lineman and returning starter Seth Rome went down with a broken leg.
Stubbs said that the loss “hurts” and that it puts a little extra focus on the offensive line’s depth in particular today.
“He’s one of our strongest kids. It brings your depth into the spotlight,” said Stubbs.