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By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

HOOVER – Just moments before torrential rain showers rolled across Spain Park High School, the Spain Park Jaguars finished up a fun couple of hours teaching skills to kids in the Hoover area at the Spain Park Football Camp on Wednesday, July 17.

With the weather working against the team and the camp announced on short notice, they considered it a success to get a large group of kids out playing on the Jags home turf.

“I think it went great,” Spain Park head football coach Tim Vakakes said. “Kind of battled the rain a little bit and we only really started pushing it last week and next year, I think we’re going to do a little bit bigger, but anytime we get our kids and community out here together with our older kids is awesome.”

Kids at the free camp rotated through offensive and defensive stations and got some conditioning in before ending the camp with a little fun by playing Jag Ball.

Throughout the day, they learned skills from their favorite Spain Park players. Vakakes and the other coaches completely turned the reins over to their players to give them an opportunity to take ownership of the afternoon.

“The best thing about it, this whole camp was player-led,” Vakakes said. “There wasn’t any of our coaches. We were here to kind of assist moving traffic, but every station was run by our Spain Park kids, every team was assigned Spain Park kids, so everything was done by our kids and that’s fun.”

That gave the players the chance to become coaches themselves, teaching the campers the same things they were taught by the Jags coaching staff.

For Vakakes, it was a great moment to hear his players say the same things to the campers that the coaches said to them.

“It’s funny, you hear the Spain Park kids telling the little kids stuff we tell them, and hearing them repeat what we tell them to the little kids, it’s pretty cool to hear,” Vakakes said.

In the end, Vakakes said that the most important part was getting the kids out on the field and interacting with the players while learning new things.

While this year’s event came together rather quickly, he hopes to make next year’s edition a true camp with multiple days and more activities.

Despite everything they dealt with though, Vakakes is glad with how everything turned out at the camp.

“We’re going to try to make it a multi-day deal next year and really put some thought and plan in,” Vakakes said. “This year, we had a lot of moving parts, so we couldn’t really put some like that together, but it was awesome to get the kids we got out here.”