A year removed from stepping into a near-impossible situation, Chanler Buck has some room — and more importantly, time — to breathe.

The Powell High School football coach takes the reins of the Panthers for a second season, but just his first with the benefit of a complete offseason.

The week-long PHS football camp starts with the first of two practices at 6 a.m. Monday morning, and culminates with an inter-squad scrimmage at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday.

The Panthers, who Buck hopes boast 80-plus players across three teams, start anew after last year’s rushed, unpredictable offseason

“The weight’s off the shoulders, I think I’m not just speaking for myself,” Buck said. “These kids are excited to come out here on Monday.”

Buck took over in an interim capacity last August, following the tragic death of longtime coach Jim Stringer in July. Buck was named the permanent head coach in January.

With a spring camp, and a full summer, and a year of experience under his belt, Buck should have the Panthers better prepared for this season than in the truncated offseason of 2014. He had the time this offseason to incorporate a full-fledged plan and evaluate his roster.

“I can kind of mold an offense and a defense, and group these guys together, and experiment with that in the summer — I’ve got three months to work with as opposed to three weeks,” Buck said. “The five, six practices you put in prior to team camp, that’s when you install and you experiment a little bit.”

The extra time helped bring the team’s veterans up to speed, which will ease some of the burden off the coaches.

“Your teaching is as much peer-tutored as it is coaches,” Buck said.

Last season, every Panther — from incoming freshmen to All-State senior starters — looked to the coaches as they tried to grasp a new system. The upperclassmen weren’t as able to relay information and provide as much leadership as is necessary on a successful team.

“The younger kids are going to learn from the vets, and when the vets are trying to learn from you — in a short time frame — in preparation for a competition, it’s a dead period. 

“It took some time, there’s no question.”

The Panthers began to show strides in midseason, when players were finally able to absorb and process their new coach and system.

“That was difficult,” Buck said. “The win-loss record doesn’t necessarily reflect how we progressed in that sense, but we definitely got better as the season went on. We had a successful season regardless. Made the playoffs, we were top three in our conference, and kids learned a lot and grew a lot in the process.”

Nearly every Powell native who will be on the 2015 varsity roster had Buck as either a coach or teacher at Powell Middle School. In a sense, another class of Buck’s recruits are entering the program and should be ahead of the learning curve. 

“I’ve always kept kind of the same terminology, and I took that from coach Stringer to begin with,” Buck said. “A good successful program at this level is all about transition. You lay your foundation on the seventh grade and kids just work off the same systems as they get older.”

Buck, too, has the advantage of being familiar with the incoming players.

“I know their personalities, I know how smart they are, and how much they appreciate the game, and where kids plug in,” Buck said.

More changes are in store this season, but they will be born in careful calculation rather than urgent necessity. 

“We’re definitely changing the offense,” Buck said. “That’s not just because of me, that’s because of our personnel. In the past we’ve had loads, we’ve had kids that were over 200 pounds across the board. We don’t have that anymore.”

The lighter, fleeter roster means the Panthers will move away, to an extent, from the ground-and-pound offense that dominated opposing defenses for three straight seasons and was a trademark of the Stringer era.

“You still gotta have a little bit of that in your arsenal,” Buck said. “We got smart kids, we’ve got a little bit of speed, not a whole lot of talent, but if kids are able to go out there and be smart and make good decisions and execute, we’re going to be successful.

“We’ve got to take advantage of what these kids’ abilities are instead of trying to force them to do what we’ve done in the past.”

With only two weeks before the team’s first competition (a zero-week home game against Custer County at 6 p.m. on Aug. 28), implementation of the team’s schemes begins right away. Buck said the first official days of practice are designed to make the kids better Powell Panther football players, not to run them into the ground.

“They should be in shape, I’m not trying to break them in a couple of days,” Buck said. “They’ll find out where they stand. There’s kids out here that are prepared. They put in the time and they put in the energy and they committed to the early morning workouts, and there’s other kids who haven’t. And they’ll know right where they are.”

If a successful football program truly is all about transition, like Buck claims, then the Panthers have successfully worked through step one and are out to prove that they’re back on the way up.

For perhaps the first time in more than a season, Powell’s coaches and players are afforded the opportunity to be fully on the same page, and, together, they want to write the next chapter in Powell Panther football.

“Our expectations for them are very high,” Buck said. “And I hope they hold the same for us. This is a completely different year. It’s a clean slate. All smiles and we’re excited.”