CROWLEY – The 2012 prep football season is rapidly approaching and nothing signifies that more than the start of scrimmages that will be taking place across the state the next few days.

Notre Dame and Iota will kick things off today when they each take the field for their annual outings.

Notre Dame will travel to Lafayette to take on St. Thomas More while Iota’s Bulldogs will be in Eunice to participate in their annual three-way scrimmage with the host Bobcats and Kaplan.

“We’re kind of getting to the point where everybody is looking forward to going to hit against somebody else,” said Notre Dame coach Lewis Cook. “We’ve been beating up on each other now for about eight to 10 days. We’re just looking forward to the opportunity to see where we are and what it’s going to look like against someone else.

“We’re ready to move on to that next step. It’s time.”

Iota coach Neal Lege echoes Cook’s assessment.

“Your scrimmage pretty much signals the start of your football season,” said Lege. “And like we told the kids the other day, it’s just another step in the evaluation process for our football team. We want to see how far we’ve gone and what we’ve got accomplished in two weeks.

“The scrimmage is kind of an indicator on what you have to go back and work on before the jamboree.”

Both Notre Dame and Iota will get a chance to see exactly how much progress they have made in the last two weeks as each team will face teams from higher classifications in their scrimmages.

For Notre Dame, the task is a difficult one - they go up against a Class 4A opponent in STM.

“St. Thomas More is one of the better teams in the state,” said Cook of the Cougars, who advanced to the state quarterfinals in 2011. “They are going to better than we are. But that’s good. They will expose the things that we need to work on. We’ll find out what we need to work on, what holds up and what doesn’t and where we need to go from here.

“I like going up against them because it does provide us with a tremendous challenge.”

For Class 2A Iota, the scrimmage challenge is similar. The Bulldogs will battle with Class 4A Eunice and Class 3A Kaplan.

“This is definitely going to be a good test for us, no doubt,” said Lege. “Eunice fields a quality football team year in and year out. Going against a bigger school with a little bit better athletes than you have, it kind of gives you an idea of what kind of kids you have.

“It’s always a very physical scrimmage and that’s what we want. We want our kids to get beat on by somebody else and kind of gauge where they’re at.”

Rayne and Church Point will also scrimmage this afternoon. The Wolves will travel to North Vermilion while the Bears will be in Opelousas to take on Westminster . Both of those scrimmages are slated for 6 o’clock.

The Crowley Gents will wrap up this week’s practices on Friday when they travel to Arnaudville to take on Beau Chene at 5:30 p.m.