CB East's Donnelly on 2026 football season expectations
Central Bucks East head coach John Donnelly talks about his expectations for the Patriots' 2026 high school football season
Video Transcript
So I'm an optimistic guy.
Our, our optimism is high, our expectations are high, and, and that's, I think, warranted and based off of, what we did at team camp up at East Stroudsburg just a month ago, against really, I think, formidable opponents.
We performed very well, so because of that, our expectations are high.
You know, go back to '21 and '22, we were back-to-back playoff appearances, very good football seasons.
'23 through '25, we're just on the outside looking in.
We're, we're fractions of points away.
We're the first seed out, but we're on the outside looking in.
And, and, you know, make no mistake about it, during that, the three-year span, the fight was there by that, by those teams.
The intent was there.
You know, just our teams, you know, the teams we played against scored more points than we did.
So, you know, our goal or one of our macro goals is to earn a playoff berth and to advance.
And so that's what we wanna do and, you know, how are we gonna do it?
So, we pride ourselves on being tough, blue-collar, physical.
And, and so that's our brand and, but we need to do that with precision.
We need to be more precise in practice and, you know, I think that's the coaching staff letting me know, "Hey, look, we can't move on until we get that right."
sometimes, you know, I make it more like chess, and it should just be checkers.
And, so that's, And look, none of that's easy because we are playing high school football, I tell our guys this all the time, high school football in the great state of Pennsylvania at the highest level, in arguably one of the toughest conferences in the state.
So it is a tall task, but I believe that we're built for it, the way that we've trained over this off-season and again how well we performed at team camp, which is not a seven-on-seven kind of deal.
It's close to the real thing as you can get.
