Lehigh Football Nation

Although technically it started yesterday with the freshmen reporting, today is the official kickoff of Lehigh's preseason camp . It really does feel like football season now, with under 30 days until the opener against Drake. (The milder weather sure helps, too.) Tomorrow, Lehigh will start with split squad practices for the first few days, followed by the first "two-a-days" in full pads starting next week up through August 24th (one day before classes begin). This year, they will have a tiny bit of overlap with Eagles camp - the Big Birds break camp on August 12th, while full two-a-days start a couple of days later for the 'Hawks. Last year, optimism abounded with coach Coen and the Lehigh troops when camp started. There were some things to work on - notably, "O" and "D"-line depth - but Lehigh had an exciting incoming class, a preseason Player of the Year on offense returning (QB Sedale Threatt), and it looked like there were going to be som...

I've been blogging about Lehigh since the 2003 football season, meaning that I'm entering my sixth straight year talking about Lehigh, "The Rivalry", and the Patriot League. It started with a computer, this upstart company called "Blogger" and a dream about a site devoted to Lehigh football coverage: the first "Football Nation", if you will, modeled after my beloved Red Sox Nation which had "officially" come into being only a year or two before my foray into... er... nationhood. Blogging has had it moments like this picture to my left, where I've simply been overwhelmed by the amount of backlog of writing articles that I've had. Holding a day job, while still writing articles for the College Sporting News and archiving articles about the FCS , it's a tough (self-imposed, admittedly) assignment. (And, yes, I probably looked a lot like that yesterday.) Each year I've done this I've looked around and seen many folks ...

We start out the blog with my interviews of the Lehigh football players at Media Day this past week. First up: senior DB Brendan VanAckeren , senior leader on the defense - and someone who loves to hit. LFN: Tell me a little bit about your high school career. You're from this area, right? BVA: I went to Liberty High School here in Bethlehem, and I've been here all my life. I was always a Lehigh guy growing up - I was always kind of around the program, seeing it in the paper and all that, so it was good how it all turned out. I had some close family friends that played for Lehigh, so they took me to games over there and I had a good idea of what it was about. I had been to the Lehigh/Lafayette game a couple of years before I came here, which was also a big draw. When I got into my junior and senior year of high school, when I got into the recruiting process, I got over to Lehigh, loved the coaches, loved the players, and the whole academic/athletic [balance]. It was defi...