NATCHEZ — Offseason workouts may be intense at Natchez High School, but head coach Lance Reed said it could always be more intense.

While other sports are in full swing, members of the 2012 football team are busy in the afternoon lifting weights and doing agility drills, even though football is seven months away.

“We’re just doing what we can do get better every day,” Reed said. “Ever since the end of the season, the coaches have had these guys in (the weight room),” Reed said.

The groups are divided into linemen and “bigger” players, and skill position players. Each group alternates between the weight training and speed and agility drills.

Reed said some of the players are pretty self-motivated, but others require that extra push by the coaches.

“We have different personalities,” Reed said. “Some of them are more motivated than others, but a lot of them recognize the improvement we see and like what we’re doing.”

The reason for working out so early in the year is simple, Reed said: Everyone else is doing it.

“Typically, the big-time programs these day work year round,” Reed said. “Football is a very intense, demanding sport. It’s important to get these kids’ bodies trained to withstand the bumps and bruises of a season and allow them to get the most out of their bodies.”

And Reed said it’s not just physical improvements that he’s looking for out of his squad.

“We also want to test their mental toughness,” Reed said. “We want to put them in the position where they can push themselves to the limit.”

Assistant coach Trey Woodard works with the linemen and bigger-sized players, and he said his goal is to get his players stronger and faster.

“You might not believe this, but our fastest group is our defensive linemen,” Woodard said. “They’re just as fast as our wide receivers, and that’s how they win. They made a ton of plays this year because of their speed.”

Woodard said he stresses speed with his defensive linemen because they typically ran smaller than some of the other schools the linemen faced this season.

“Technique helps when you’re big, and we’re good at teaching that, but our guys are going to have to be fast, because we’re smaller,” Woodard said. “On average, the other schools had somewhere around 70 pounds on our (defensive line) this past season.”

Woodard said running sprints help his players with technique and the form of proper running, while plyometrics teach explosion and running form. Inside the weight room, Woodard said he’s very impressed with his group’s progression.

“This isn’t the most talented group we’ve ever had, and that’s not to say they aren’t talented, but they work harder,” Woodard said. “They get stronger each week and have made huge gains in the weight room.”

As the weeks go by, Reed said he will also host competition-based activities and have classes in order to teach his players the schemes.

“Some days we’ll have tug-of-war or shuttle drills and relays, and we’ll use that to create a sense of competition,” Reed said.

The competition activities are meant to instill a competitive nature in the players, Reed said.

“If we see a kid get in a drill and want to win every drill, those things translate to the field,” Reed said. “If they display maximum effort for you every time, you figure that will happen on Friday nights, too.”

Reed also said he’s hoping to implement a program in the near future to allow eighth-graders to come in and adjust to high school-level training.