Chelsea hosts hundreds of kids at football camp

Published 3:41 pm Thursday, August 3, 2023

By Andrew Simonson

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By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

CHELSEA – Just a few weeks before the Friday night lights turn on, the Chelsea Hornets opened their stadium doors to host the Chelsea Football Camp from July 31-Aug. 1.

Almost 300 kids attended the camp and learned the game from their favorite Hornets players.

Chelsea head coach Todd Cassity said the camp was a great success.

“Everybody seemed to really enjoy it,” Cassity said. “Our football players enjoyed being able to work with our youth. I thought it went really well.”

The camp had two different sessions on each day. The first was for flag football players, and the second was for tackle football players.

In both two-hour sessions, the campers ran through a circuit of multiple different stations where they learned how to properly perform football skills like catching, blocking and tackling among others.

“It was just different skills that are important to football, and it seemed like they all learned a lot from it,” Cassity said.

At each of the stations, Hornets players were waiting and ready to teach their skills to the campers. It was special for the campers to meet and play football with the Chelsea players they get to watch every week on the field.

For Cassity, it was special too because he and the coaches got to see the players teaching what the coaches had taught them all offseason.

“It’s good to see our players doing things like wide receivers teaching routes,” Cassity said. “It means that they can teach it to a kid, that means we’ve probably done a good enough job to teach it to them. So, it’s always good to see that.”

Cassity and the coaches know how important it is to teach local kids how to properly play football because some of them will go on to represent Chelsea on the football field. They’re teaching the future, and the process of teaching them doesn’t start when they walk through the doors as a potential player, but at camps like this.

“You’re building your program,” Cassity said. “You’re creating a pipeline, and hopefully those kids are going to remember it and then build their knowledge base so that eventually, they’ll be able to do that type of stuff in the future.”

On top of that, Cassity and Chelsea are building a community, and one that will support the Hornets for years to come. The campers had fun with all of the players, and fun experiences like that turn into Hornets pride, which Cassity saw as the camp closed. For him, that was his favorite part of the camp.

“Just seeing the smiles on the faces of the kids,” Cassity said. “We did a group activity at the end and all of them just breaking down on Chelsea. It’s always great.”

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