Last weekend was the first opportunity for area football teams to hit someone other than one of their teammates when each school engaged in a three- or four-way scrimmage as a tuneup for this weekend’s season-opener.

Not surprisingly, most coaches hope to accomplish the same thing. “We want to be physical, we don’t want to turn it over, we want to do the fundamentals right, and obviously we want to come out healthy,” said Oxford third-year coach Mike Chrystie.

So how did Chrystie’s team fare against the likes of Chenango Forks, Delhi, and Vestal? “I felt it was the best we’ve looked since I’ve been here,” he said. “Scoring on Forks twice gave us a lot of confidence. We didn’t show anything but our bread and butter stuff, and I think that’s what the other teams did, too.”

Unadilla Valley-Edmeston is coming off a winless season, and it had just a skeleton crew eligible for a four-way scrimmage that included Sherburne-Earlville, B-G, and Morrisville-Eaton. “I thought we held up physically until fatigue set in at the end,” said Storm head coach Jack Loeffler. “We ran nothing but our base stuff, and it was good. We have an intelligent buch of kids, and they all have good football sense. We saw some flaws, of course, and went to work on those this week in practice.”