SPRING FOOTBALL: Blackwell returns to Catholic with 'toughness' on his mind

Catholic coach Aubrey Blackwell addresses his team after a recent practice. Blackwell had 48 players go through spring drills. (Tim Gayle)

By TIM GAYLE

Catholic football coach Aubrey Blackwell looked over the 2026 schedule and knew right away the focus for his team this spring.

The Knights wrapped up spring practice recently with an intrasquad scrimmage.

“The most important thing is we wanted to reestablish some physicality and toughness,” Blackwell said. “We’ve got a lot of young guys that we know that are going to be counted on this year so we wanted to give them a lot of reps, a lot of responsibility, and at the same time we wanted to make sure the standard was being upheld.

“We had a lot of new faces as far as guys that had not played a lot on Friday night that we needed to make sure we got them some reps and we teach them how to do it. The absolute number one (goal) is to make sure that we didn’t get anyone hurt and we accomplished that.”

A total of 48 players went through spring drills over the past two weeks and among the new faces is Blackwell’s son Will, the first-team quarterback. In addition to having their third head coach in as many years, the Knights also will have new coordinators on both sides of the ball for the third consecutive year.

“I think they (offensive players) did well, for the most part,” Blackwell said. “We tried to make several things as similar as we can. Luckily, my offensive terminology is extremely similar to Cody Hodgens, who was here two years ago as the offensive coordinator with Coach ‘J’ (Kirk Johnson) so there are a lot of similarities. Luckily for us, we were able to get a lot of offense in, because of that.

“Ty Hardnett, my defensive coordinator, was at Prattville last year. Things with him are very new; however, Coach (Patrick) Plott is back so everything we did in the back half (secondary) is the same. Our coverage is the same but our front has changed.”

Blackwell would like to see more of a running threat from his offense, but said he liked the Knights’ passing attack as well as the defense’s work in the trenches.

“I think we threw the ball well, we caught the ball well and defensively we were physical up front,” Blackwell said. “I thought we did some things where we were aggressive, we were hard to block in the box and we had some new faces up there.”

Orlando Parker returns up front and is joined by former linebacker Cam Chappelle. AJ Dottery moved to a weakside linebacker position that will often double as an additional rusher.

“We were able to put some older faces in there,” Blackwell said. “But we were questioning how physical are we going to be and we were. We were very physical, we were very fast in those spots.”

The Knights open the 2026 season on Aug. 21 at Eufaula.