BATON ROUGE - When LHSAA's decided to delay the football season until at least Oct. 8 and reduce the number of games played, coaches began the work of preparing their players.

"If we play five or six games, seven games, we're going to be ready to play all of those," Scotlandville High school head coach, Lester Ricard, Jr. said. "If we play two games, we're going to be ready for those too."

The Hornets haven't been on the field in roughly two weeks, instead choosing to prepare inside the weight room.

"We lost three or four months in the weight room, so that's been our sole focus," Ricard said. "Trying to get out numbers back, our strength numbers back, in the weight room."

Scotlandville's sights are now set on October. Ricard had previously supported a delay to the season as COVID-19 cases increased across the state.

"I was really anticipating possibly playing football in January sometime," he said. "To kind of get an estimated date, it doesn't really do anything for us. We're just going to continue with our process and preparing for tomorrow."

Ricard said team members he spoke to Wednesday are excited about the latest plan. He cautioned them to manage expectations for a timeline even LHSAA calls ambitious.

"It is ambitious," Ricard said. "What happens the first week of October [when] we look up, and the numbers go back up because kids are about to go back to schools."

Richard, who says this year's Hornets team is the best he's ever coached, applauds the measures preventing contact between players until cases decline for two weeks, as well as plans for if players and coaches test positive for COVID-19. Even with a shot at a state championship, he says he's still putting the safety of his team ahead of winning football games on Friday nights.

"I'm excited and I want to see them play," Ricard said. "I want [the] kids to play. I just hope that we're prepared for both sides of it, for it to stop and for it to continue to go."