Watch CBS News

Spring Practice In The Books For WCU Football

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The Division II West Chester University football team wrapped up its spring practice schedule this past Saturday with its annual spring game. The Purple beat the Gold, 26-20.

West Chester is coming off a 7-4 2015 season and head coach Bill Zwaan liked what he saw during the spring.

"I think most of the spring, our defense really played very well," Zwaan tells KYW Newsradio. "They actually were dominating through most of the spring. Then in the spring game, the offense came around and played pretty good. So, at the end, I felt like both sides of the ball were positives."

Listen to the entire interview with West Chester head coach Bill Zwaan

 

The defense was led by a front line that really grabbed Zwaan's attention.

"We graduated Andrew Cohen, who is the leading (quarterback) sacker in the school's history and we've got to figure out a way to make that up," Zwaan says. "We also graduated Barry Lyons, one of our other starting defensive linemen. So our concern going in (to the spring) was can we replace the sacks and how are going to be against the run, because both those guys did a good job for us against the run. I think right now, leaving spring, we feel like there is a way to replace those sacks, we're not going to have one guy do what Andrew did, but we've got enough up front to get sacks out of those guys. And the way they played against the run, even in the spring game, when the offense had some success, we still couldn't establish the run game against our defense."

On offense, West Chester is deep at the quarterback position. Last season was Pat Moriarty's first as a starter and he got better as the campaign went on. Moriarty is set to be a junior in the fall. In addition, Andrew Derr is back with the program after an off the field issue kept him out in 2015.

"We started out this spring with Pat as the starter and we came out of the spring with Pat still the starter," Zwaan says. "Andrew is challenging him, he got hurt a little bit late in the spring, so he didn't play in the spring game. Pat had a really good spring game. So right now we'll go into the fall with Pat #1, but we have plans to use (Derr) in certain ways and we're still going to let him try to challenge for the job."

Two other names to keep an eye on with regards to the quarterback position for West Chester are Alec Werner and Paul Dooley.

West Chester will open the 2016 season on September 3rd on the road at Bentley.

View CBS News In
CBS News App Open
Chrome Safari Continue
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.