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Football teams in LHSAA are now able to exercise with restrictions.

Over at Franklinton, the Demons began on Tuesday with stretching, weightlifting and cooling down exercises.

Franklinton coach Jonathan Barber talked about the excitement of being back.

“It’s very exciting,” Barber said. “This is kind of one of the parts of the job that I really enjoy as far as being able to lift, watch our kids grow strength wise and develop some mental toughness and things like that. It’s exciting to be back out. I thought our kids were really fired up today to be out here today, to be around one another, just to compete and I think that’s good for us. Like I told them at the end we’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve got a lot of time and we’ll get there.”

Some of the restrictions schools are under include social distancing, a limit of 25 inside the building, 50 outside for conditioning, they have to do temperature checks and no hanging out in the locker room.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancelation of spring games and practices, so Franklinton and everybody else is playing catch up because of the time they lost because of the virus.

“I think everybody is having to deal with it and it’s really about — we talk to our kids a lot about responding to adversity — so it’s about how do we respond to that? Everybody’s dealing with the same type of thing and we just have to be able to handle it better than everybody on our schedule and hopefully we will. We’ve got a plan in place and we’re looking forward to the next couple of months of getting back to work.”

Washington Parish features four teams in LHSAA in Bogalusa, Franklinton, Pine and Varnado.

The parish jamboree takes place Aug. 28 at Franklinton with opening week set for Sept. 4.

The local MAIS schools, Ben’s Ford Christian School and Bowling Green School.

Their jamboree week is the week of Aug. 14 with opening week for both teams on Aug. 21.