During the summer, joint practices with two high school football teams were fairly common. DeKalb had three such days throughout summer workouts, while Morris had one, pairing up with Minooka.

The week before the regular season begins has traditionally been for teams to scrimmage against each other in front of fans. This year, though, Morris hosted DeKalb. The teams played on the freshman and JV levels first before the varsity squads took the field.

Each team ran 20 offensive plays. First, DeKalb ran 12 plays, then Morris ran 12 plays. Each team ran eight plays in their second time with the ball, mostly with the second-string units on both offense and defense.

DeKalb was playing without some key players, most notably University of Illinois-bound receiver Devon Grant. The Morris defense did not allow the Barbs to score in either of their sets of 10 plays.

Morris, meanwhile, had no trouble finding the end zone. All they had to do was give the ball to Caeden Curran. The Morris senior running back scored long TD runs on Morris’ second and third plays from scrimmage. After getting through the line, Curran was able to spin off a tackle each time and continue to the end zone.

“This actually felt like a real game,” Curran said. “We had the fans out here cheering for us, and this is what we want to do all year.

“The offensive line was great. I was able to wait and let them do their thing. Then, when I saw the hole, I got through it and kept going.”

On the final play in Morris’ first sequence, quarterback Brady Varner launched a deep pass toward the end zone. Receiver Quaid Phillips had a defender on him, but he reached out with one hand and caught the ball in the end zone.

Morris coach Alan Thorson was quite pleased with his team’s performance.

“The biggest thing is that we came out of this healthy,” he said. “That was the biggest fear in something like this. But, someone could get hurt in an intra-squad game, too. This is our second scrimmage like this, the other being with Minooka. We like to play schools bigger than us so it gives us a chance to see what we really need to work on.

“We saw some things tonight that we have to correct, but now that gives us time to fix them before our season opener [at home against Wilmington] next week. I think our defense was very impressive, and that’s not taking anything away from our offense. Scoring on our second, third and 12th plays is awfully good, but for our defense to keep them out of the end zone and fly to the ball the way they did was really good to see.”

DeKalb coach Derek Schneeman also enjoyed the joint scrimmage.

“We had some guys that didn’t go tonight, but they would have if it had been a regular season game,” he said. “There was no reason to risk an injury tonight.

“We wanted to go on the road and play a good program. We know Morris is a good program and we know they are going to be physical, which they were. I thought we did some good things offensively at times, but we have to be able to finish drives. The defense didn’t play poorly, but there are some things we need to work on, and now we know what those are.”