Tigers Wrap Up Spring With Wet Purple-Gold Game

COLUMBIA, S.C. – The Benedict Tigers closed out their spring practice with a 45-minute scrimmage on Saturday in their Purple-Gold game in the cold and rain. But the wet weather didn't dampen Coach Chennis Berry's intensity as the team now looks forward to the 2023 season.

"I coach them harder now, because I don't want them to get complacent," Berry said. "Every day, I'm coaching them hard like they didn't win a game. That's the mindset we've got to have, to keep them humble and hungry. I don't know if they won any games. The 2022 season is over. We're getting ready for 2023. Again, we're focused on what's important now. That's no opportunity wasted. Whatever happened in 2022, I have no idea what happened. I'm trying to go 1-0 today."

And despite the less than ideal elements on Saturday, Berry was pleased with the team's overall progress over their 15 team spring practices.

"We just want to get better every day. I thought throughout the whole entire spring, we got better," Berry said. "The whole mission for each week is to get the young guys reps. We return 15 starters from last year, so we have a lot of guys who played a lot. But we also have guys who haven't taken a whole lot of snaps. We wanted to get those guys reps. We put our young men every day in game-like situations, to see how they would do in those type situations. I thought our guys really improved at a lot of positions. At the end of the day, we got better as a football team."

The Tigers used two quarterbacks during Saturday's scrimmage – redshirt freshman Zayshaun Rice and Kendall McKoy, a sophomore who transferred in January from Gardner-Webb. Zavien Foster, who took most of the repetitions with the starters for most of the spring, did not play Saturday.

"I think he improved more than the other quarterbacks," Berry said about Foster. "I'm excited about him. Zay Rice was a guy who was on scout team last year. He's very, very smart and he's taking advantage of his reps. Kendall McKoy is still learning. He just got here. You're not going to learn our offense in five minutes or five practices, or 15 practices. He's still got some work to do, as do all of them. We signed a high school quarterback, we signed a transfer quarterback and we're going to sign one more transfer quarterback. At end of the day, we're going to be ready when we kick off on September 2."

With spring practice in the books, all the focus is now on getting ready for the 2023 season.

"I was just grateful for the effort of the young men. Every day they were locked in. We don't want to just have a good football team, we want to have a good football program, that wins day in and day out, week in and week out," Berry said.

"We signed a nice class of guys in February. We're bringing in some more transfers to what we already have, and when we get ready to line up in 2023, we'll have a really good football team."