With a large senior class having graduated and a small incoming senior group, the Powell Panther football team learned plenty in its team camp, taking a number of young players to Black Hills State University in June.

Coach Chase Kistler said the Panthers took approximately 40 athletes to the camp, led by around five seniors mixed with a number of incoming freshmen, sophomores and juniors.

“The bulk of it was young players, but they’re players that are going to be on the field next year. So it’s kind of hard to call them younger players,” Kistler said. “They’re the guys that are going to be out there next year. It just turns out that we’ve got the kind of numbers that our young guys are going to have to carry the bulk of the load.”

Kistler said the Panthers installed a number of new things offensively and defensively with the new personnel in the program, keeping it simple early in the summer.

On both sides of the ball, he said they had a number of sophomores and even freshmen involved in the varsity lineup as well as a primarily freshmen team in the junior varsity division, helping get those players up to speed while facing some top competition.

“They got their eyes opened when they went to camp because there were some pretty good sized schools that we competed against and we were kind of right in the middle of the pack,” Kistler said. “We ended up in the top five teams competing on the last day. I think that really opened up the eyes of our players that either we’re kind of in the mix, but also what we need to actually do moving ahead. We’ve still got a lot of room for improvement in terms of just strength and size.”

He said the need for those improvements was noticeable against the top teams, some of which had won state championships recently in Colorado, as well as South Dakota teams that had been constant contenders with a significantly larger program from schools that have 900-1,000 students.

“The level of competition was good. It opened their eyes,” Kistler said. “I think it was good for them because our numbers in the weight room have kind of shown that they do understand that we’ve got some work to do getting bigger and stronger.”

Throughout the camp, Kistler said that coaching staff took note of how often they were rotating players, saying that will be key to the development of the Panthers both young and old early in the season — likely rotating players significantly to preserve health and develop depth quicker than years past.

“We’re going to have to rotate a lot more players early in the season and our nonconference games just to get players up to speed,” Kistler said. “I think with the younger players we’re going to have to rotate a lot more. They’re still playing four quarters, but they’re playing a series here, then they’re getting a rest.”

He said that’s different from year’s past when many Panthers played both ways each series all game.

“We would get dinged up,” Kistler said. “So this year, we’re going to look at just rotating more and more guys and looking at getting more guys experience rather than necessarily worrying about the win or loss at the end of the game. We just need to get guys (experience), build depth and build it quick.”

Kistler said they had a number of players step up during the camp, including Lincoln Crawford, Tanner Seifert, Brady Harvey, Rowan Diaz, Tyler Wenzel, Breckyn Kobbe and Caleb Ashcraft, among others.

“We had a lot of positives come out of camp,” Kistler said. 

He added that the younger Panthers who competed on the junior varsity team were primarily freshmen, boasting a strong line along with some good backfield players in Ethan Ely and Russell Goolsbey, among others.

The Panthers have continued to lift and prepare for the fall season the remainder of the summer, with practices for football kicking off Aug. 17.