He’s become a do-it-all type of player for Bradford this season.
Elijah Fitton, a junior, has emerged this year as an explosive playmaker for the Owls, and in plenty of different ways.
Entering Friday night’s game at Ridgway, Fitton leads the team in all-purpose yardage with 381 total yards so far. Of that, a huge chunk has come through special teams, with Fitton amassing 284 yards on kick returns thus far.
He also ran for a team-high 62 yards at Kane last week to push his season total to 77 yards and a touchdown (scored at St. Marys), and has contributed in the passing game with a trio of receptions.
“He brings energy and a lot of electricity,” head coach Jeff Puglio said. “He’s made a lot of plays, especially on special teams. Any time we can get the ball in his hands, something exciting happens. So we’re trying to find more ways to get him the ball.”
One way the Owls are looking to do so in particular is to keep feeding him in the run game. Bradford has gotten off to a slow start with its rush attack this year, but is slowly bringing that aspect of its new air raid scheme along.
Fitton has the most yards of anybody on the ground right now, and Puglio says continuing to establish that ground attack will be vital for the Owls.
“We want to establish the run, and that’s something we have to focus on this week especially,” the coach said. “If we can get our ground game going, it opens up the passing game.”
On Fitton’s end, building on his performance against Kane begins with the fundamentals, the running back/wideout hybrid says.
“I just try to follow my lead blockers and then look for open holes,” he said.
Of Friday night’s contest, he added, “We just need to focus more, have some motivation and just hit our blocks and go out and play.”
That’s a message Puglio has stressed to his charges in recent weeks. The Owls have made plays, but have shot themselves in the foot with miscues such as turnovers at some of the most inopportune times.
“I think what our issue has been is mental focus,” Puglio said. “We’ve been lacking that, and the mental mistakes have been piling up for us, so it’s something we’ve been really stressing this week.”
Part of that, however, is to be expected in a year of change. Add onto that all of the changes and uncertainties COVID-19 has brought, and the transition has been even tougher, according to Puglio.
“It’s a young team in the sense that we’ve never done this before. We ran the ball for 30 years,” Puglio said. “We were pretty good at it and had success in the Wing-T, but now we’re going in a completely different direction, so the learning curve is steep.
“Then we go into a bubble with teams that have been together for a few years now, and their systems are in place. And we didn’t have double sessions and couldn’t do 7-on-7s, so all of those things you would like to have to prepare, we couldn’t.”
The solution moving forward, the coach asserts, is for the Owls to simply play within themselves.
“It’s just paying attention to detail, being patient and not getting so amped up that we lose control and lose focus,” Puglio said. “We just need to slow things down. We’ll be alright, and the improvements we’ve made from Week 1 to where we are right now are tremendous. It hasn’t shown up on the scoreboard or statline, but it’s there and these kids are working really, really hard.”
