New Bainbridge High School head football coach Jeff Littleton said he has been impressed by the progress his team has made through the first four days of their spring practice.

“We’ve gotten better each day, and our pace has gotten better and faster,” he said. “The kids are responding well to learning the new schemes and the new way that we do some things.”

Bainbridge opened its spring practice Monday and will continue with five more days next week, culminating with an intra-squad scrimmage on Friday at 5 p.m. at Centennial Field.

Littleton was hired in March to replace former head coach Ed Pilcher, who is now the head coach at Berrien County. Littleton had served the last eight seasons as the defensive coordinator at Cairo.

Littleton’s offensive coordinator is Scott Roberts, who was previously the offensive coordinator at Tift County. Littleton and Roberts have said that the Bearcats will run a balanced offensive attack primarily using the I-formation, a marked difference from Pilcher’s veer-based system.

Littleton said that he and his staff have allowed the players to slowly transition to learning the new offensive and defensive systems, rather than overwhelm them with new schemes and plays.

“We’ve just been starting from the bottom and slowly building our way back up,” he said. “We didn’t want to throw everything at them all at once. We’re just working on some of the basic parts of our offense, and adding a little more each day.”

Practice on Thursday afternoon was in 80-degree heat, and it is likely to get even warmer next week. Littleton said that players’ safety is at the forefront of the coaching staff’s minds. Players get water breaks every 20 minutes, and the water is located in a shaded portion of the practice field.

“We’ve got large enough numbers of kids that when one group is working on the field, another group can be getting some water, and then we can rotate again,” Littleton said.

He also continued to praise the hard work of his coaching staff, some of whom came with him from Cairo, some were also members of Pilcher’s staff, and some who have never coached at Bainbridge or with Littleton before.

“We have a great staff and everybody has been really working together to get things accomplished,” he said. “Everything’s been going real smoothly thanks to the hard work of our coaches.”