Fitzgerald host four teams for summer joint padded practice

FITZGERALD, Ga. (WALB) - South Georgia can not avoid the heatwave that’s going on across the country, at Jaycee stadium the Fitzgerald Purple Hurricanes who was in last years state championship is holding OTA’s. In about a month the season begins but this week they got their final look in pads and against other teams. Some of those teams included Dougherty, Mitchell County and Colquitt County, all coming here to put the final touches as they get ready for the regular season and the acclimation period next week.

Fitzgerald coach Tucker Pruitt said, “You always want to find out where you’re at and how you do that is going against good teams and really in June and July you can get your but whooped for free it don’t cost you a loss so we want to set the bar high, we want to go against good people and we’ll find out where we stack where we stand out and what we need to work on so I think we got some good reps today and we’ll continue to gain a lot of good experience against a lot of good teams.”

Experience is something the Canes already have, three straight state title appearances and it’s something all of the squads out here today are striving for. The Canes focus is to not get complacent.

“Well it’s hard to win a championship it really is there’s a lot of good teams and you got to be really lucky you got to get a good bracket, you got to stay healthy. I think the big thing for us this year is we got an awesome group of seniors a lot of them have played in two straight championship games already so they know what it takes,” said Pruitt.

The Canes will host one more of these Thursday morning with most the teams returning. Tift County will join the mix replacing Colquitt.

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