The Vicksburg Gators opened up spring football drills this week. But for Warren Central, the spring session is coming to an end.

Coach Curtis Brewer’s Vikings will wrap up spring practice Friday night at 7 with a Red-White game at Viking Stadium.

Coach Alonzo Stevens’ Gators, meanwhile, will work toward a May 12 jamboree at Magee.

Brewer, whose team finished its 12th day of work on Tuesday, said the focus this spring is the reason behind the early start and an intrasquad spring game.

“School-wide physicals are going to be held on a Saturday (May 7) and we wanted to have two Saturday scrimmages. We’ve got a lot of players that we want to get a look at,” said Brewer, entering his second year as the Vikings head coach. “By dividing up into two teams for the Red-White game, we get the chance to look at all of our sophomores.”

The Vikings have 80 players on their spring roster. Stevens also reported 80 for the Gators.

“We’re excited about our team. We have 16 starters back, with eight on offense and eight on defense,” Stevens said.

With a veteran team coming back from last year’s 5-6 season, Stevens was anxious to find some competition for a spring game.

“We’re going to have a whole lot of contact this spring because we’ve got a pretty tough spring jamboree on the 12th at Magee. We’ll see Magee, West Jones and Hazlehurst,” Stevens said.

The Vikings were 10-2 last season, but according to Brewer, they are a lot of holes to fill.

“The spring is all about setting a roster for the summer workouts and to give you a plan for the fall,” he said. “What we needed was to look at as many kids as possible. We lost all but two of our offensive linemen.”

Other big graduation losses include standout tailback Larry Warner and defensive tackle Zach Balthrop.

“A lot of people have enjoyed watching Larry run the football, he was a special type of a running back. We feel like we’ve got four tailbacks, but our sophomore backs are just not ready for 5A football,” Brewer said. “We’ve also got to find someone to fill Zach Balthrop’s spot. He played so tough and was a settling force for our defense.”

Another area of concern is in the secondary.

“We lost both of our corners but we do have our starters at safety and free safety back. We’ve got six kids working at the corner,” Brewer said.

The focus for Stevens is to refine the Gators’ returning nucleus.

“Our main goal is to find 22 offensive and 22 defensive players we can count on,” Stevens said.

“Last year we were pretty solid on defense but we were pretty young on offense. We like what we have, we just need to refine it,” he said.

Vicksburg will open its regular season in the Red Carpet Bowl at Viking Stadium against Kirby High School of Memphis, Tenn. The Vikings’ Red Carpet Bowl foe will be Indianola-Gentry.

Porters Chapel has seven players out for spring workouts mainly because most of the football players also are baseball players. The Eagles are in the second round of the Academy-A state playoffs.

St. Aloysius was recently eliminated from the baseball playoffs and will continue strength and conditioning for football.