Chipley spring practice moving on without key players and it’s no problem, coach says

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (WJHG/WECP) -The Chipley football team is winding down spring practice, and the numbers are a mixed bag for coach Marcus Buchanan and his staff. They are dealing with some rather strong numbers overall for football here in spring. That as these Tigers work towards building on a terrific 11-1 season in 2022. Coach tells us he has 55 players out for spring, and that’s a big number. The mixed bag part of the equation, Chipley is missing more than a handful of guys expected to contribute on the football field, who are still working with coach Compton and the Tigers baseball team down in Fort Myers! “And that’s a good number (55) considering that we still have 11 still playing baseball, and that puts us at 66 you know going into the summer.” coach Buchanan told us “Which we feel like is a strong number for a 1A school. And especially hearing about other people having 15 or 20 kids out right now for their whole program. For us to be sitting on 66, that is a blessing so we’re excited about that. And like we said we’ve got 11 playing baseball and then we’ve graduated 16 so it’s 27 guys of last year’s team that aren’t out here right now. But we’re just doing that right now as an opportunity for some of these other guys to get wraps, and some of these other guys to prove what they can do.”

And cycling in the young guys here in spring absolutely fits into the overall plan coach Buchanan has for his team, his program. “Yeah we’re not really building teams for a one-year time, we’ve built a program here. So when 16 kids graduate we’ve got 26 coming into the ninth grade so we’re actually going to be bigger than we were last year. It’s one of those things, an undefeated JV football team last year, they went six endow, those guys will get a chance now to move up to the varsity to share what they can do. And it’s kind of how we want to build this thing you know, just keep it going you know. "

The Tigers were set to host Marianna in their spring game Friday. But because so many Chipley folks are heading to Fort Myers this week, they’ve decided to push back to Saturday at 6 for that spring game.

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