While the first kickoff is still about a month away, the season has officially begun for the Morgan Academy Senators.

The Senators took the practice field for the first time on Thursday, as they worked on base offensive and defensive formations and plays in preparation for their first game of the 2012 season — a road trip to Pike Liberal Arts School in Troy on Aug. 24.

Bob Taylor, head football coach of Morgan Academy, said he was excited to be back on the field, and the players showed a solid effort on day one.

“The biggest thing I saw that I liked is that we’re out here. The season has started and it got here in a hurry,” Taylor said. “The effort was there today, we had a small learning curve working on base plays and trying to get everything together. We kind of started dragging toward the end — I’m sure the heat had a little bit to do with that. We’ve got to focus a little bit better and work on what we’re doing.”

Taylor said, overall, he was pleased with the effort and he’s hoping to see the pace pick up as the Senators continue practice on Friday and into next week.

“We’re going to try to get our tempo up a little bit and get more reps in. Today was more, ‘okay, let’s walk through this, let’s make sure we understand where we’re going,’” Taylor said. “By this time next week, I expect us to be rattling plays off pretty quick where we’re not having to stop and explain a whole lot.”

Morgan will have its first two-a-day practice when it continues on Friday — taking the field once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

Taylor said the Senators will continue two-a-days next week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and will hold single practices on Tuesday and Thursday.

Taylor added the two-a-day schedule is broken up that way in order to give the players a bit of a break, and Morgan will focus on one side of the ball during those two-a-day practices.

“We’re alternating our two-a-day schedule. We’re getting more days in of two-a-days and it’s allowing us to kind of recover a little bit and not have one week of two-a-days and everybody’s dying by the end of the week,” Taylor said. “We’re going to take totally offense one practice in the two-a-day, then totally defense a practice, so we can focus in on those things and start adding our special teams in with those.”

Taylor also said two-a-days will allow the coaching staff to work on the fundamentals for extended periods of time with the players, which is crucial to making things work for the team as a whole.

“We can get so much more fundamental work in. Today, we went over one play for 20 minutes and when we take that time in an individual practice it’s going to allow us to rep individually,” Taylor said. “We’re going to do fundamental work for 35-40 minutes and when you can get that much fundamental work in, that goes a long way.

“You’ve got to be good in your fundamental game to be able to execute the team game.”