Ashley Ingram pre-South Carolina Central Christian College press conference transcripts
JEFFERSON CITY, Tenn. - Carson-Newman welcomes South Carolina Central Christian College to the banks of Mossy Creek for a 6 p.m. kick Thursday. Below are Ashley Ingram's pregame remarks to the media about the Gladiators.
VIDEO: Ashley Ingram Press Conference
JEFFERSON CITY, Tenn. - Carson-Newman welcomes South Carolina Central Christian College to the banks of Mossy Creek for a 6 p.m. kick Thursday. Below are Ashley Ingram's pregame remarks to the media about the Gladiators.
OPENING STATEMENT:
INGRAM: We're just excited to get another opportunity to play. I'm just grateful that we've got a game this week. You know, we lost our game versus Limestone, pretty late in the spring. I think that they made their final decision almost around May 1. So just to be able to find a football game. We've got a second year program in South Carolina Central Christian coming to town. Got some athletic guys on the team, but obviously very young, very inexperienced. But our concern is playing well, playing clean and playing Carson-Newman football. And I think our guys will be eager to play again.
Q1: Coupled with the short week, where do you turn to for growth?
INGRAM: Well, we made a lot of mistakes, so we need to continue to grow. We need to play better, so we'll just kind of try to continue to do that. We played a lot of guys against West Virginia State and hopefully we can get a lot of guys in the game again Thursday night.
Q2: How valuable is it at this stage in the season to get some of your youth, some extended experience?
INGRAM: . You can see it in practice, but until you see it on the game field, it's different. So we'll continue to do that as much as we can and there'll be guys that that played a little bit this past Saturday, that as the season progresses, their role will continue to grow.
Q3: What's your expectatoin of Teddy Gleaton at QB?
INGRAM: The expectation is he'll continue to grow and he'll get better. You know, he is an older guy, but he's just doesn't have a lot of experience in games. So Teddy played well. We got him out, got some other guys in. He will have a very limited role hopefully this week as well. We can play a lot of guys, but we just want to see Teddy grow as a player, as a decision maker. If he does those things, he's got a chance to be a really good player.
Q4: You said earlier that there were a lot of things to get better on from West Virginia State and that comes from a game where you played turnover free. You were penalized only five times. Where you look for improvement when you know there are some elements that are typical week one talking points that really aren't there for you.
INGRAM: But I think the operation was fine, the penalties were fine. I think it was more or less. When you look at the football stuff, there's some things we messed up, there's some coverages we messed up, there's some guys that lost their gap defensively, offensively, some of our assignments are really more understanding the detail and nuance of their assignment. We got to get better at some of those things.
Q5: Nice to be in depth on that at this point as opposed to cleaning up some more obvious things.
INGRAM: We're doing a lot of new things. Offensively, we were very, very vanilla with that this past week. We'll continue to expand upon that. But yeah, there's a lot to work on and I guess there always will be.
Q6: I find it amusing to hear the phrase we were vanilla offensively when you spent an entire half in a formation that never saw the field last year. I don't want you to reveal the recipe too much, but where can the complexity come from?
INGRAM: Well, as I've said, the plan last year going into it was to do a little more offensively than what we did. And just the thought process when we got going is we needed to commit to something so we committed to our under center option game. A lot of stuff we're doing now, stuff we did for years at Navy and we'll just continue to expand upon what we're doing and play to the strengths of our players and hopefully keep getting better at everything we do.
Q7: Thursdays have typically been where Carson-Newman football makes its hay with student crowds. What would it mean for that to continue on Thursday?
INGRAM: We have class on Friday so I don't see any reason why the students shouldn't be there. So we'd love to have a good crowd, we'd love to have a good student section. Obviously our cheerleaders are band did a great job supporting us, so we'd love to get a good crowd on Thursday night.
Q8: Anything else?
INGRAM: We're excited to play and see where we are after two weeks
Kickoff between the Eagles and Gladiators is set for 6 p.m.. Coverage on the Eagle Sports Network begins at 5 p.m. with the AEC Tailgate Show on Joy 620 (WRJZ-AM, Knoxville), MIX 105.5 (WSEV-FM, Sevierville) and online at cneagles.com/live.
