ANGOLA – Snider head football coach Kurt Tippmann is in a classroom Wednesday instructing four potential quarterbacks on the finer points of playing the important position.

Chalk in hand, the second-year Panthers’ leader is laying out the general philosophies on the blackboard of being a signal-caller at one of the perennial football powers in northeast Indiana.

Soon, the quarterbacks will join the rest of the almost 90 players on the football field for drills and 7-on-7 competition with the Snider video equipment trailer just off the north end zone.

Nothing unusual about the scenarios – expect the location.

In a break from the norm, Snider took its annual team camp to Trine University for three days of intrasquad competition and camaraderie.

“We wanted an atmosphere where we could get them away and get them out of their environment and out of their surroundings, and they were spending more time together,” Tippmann said. “So we have three days of 24 hours a day of being together.”

In a practice not seen too much these days, the Panthers will stay at the Trine dorms, attend meetings in the college’s classrooms and use the relatively new field turf on a campus filled with renovations and construction, especially in and around the football field.

There will be four practices in three days for Snider.

“Nobody has done it before us, so it is something new,” Snider senior defensive back Kendal Frederick said. “I think it is a real cool experience. We will be able to get away from everything and get away from Fort Wayne, everything like that and all the drama, and focus on football.”

There will be no cell phones in order to allow the focus to be on football.

“We aren’t overloading them with football,” Tippmann said. “We are able to have some meetings and watch more film, away from the distractions. It is just our team together for these three days.”

Tippmann said some teams may go to bigger colleges like Purdue or Indiana, but that the expenses were too much for the players to attend that kind of team camp. The price was right at Trine, and Tippmann said Thunder coach Matt Land and the school administration have been accommodating.

Tippmann said the initial thought of having the team camp at Trine made the players a little concerned it was going to mirror the three-a-day practices at Gettysburg College in the movie “Remember the Titans.”

“When we first said we were going to do this, the kids kind of got weary that it was going to be boot camp, but it is not,” Tippmann said. “We are going to work hard, but it is a unique opportunity. Some of them didn’t even know where Trine was. It gets them on a college campus, and they can see what college life might be like down the road.”

gjones@jg.net