To say the Eastlake Wolves football team exuded pure optimism during the third day of spring workouts would be an understatement.

The Wolves, who finished the 2015 season with a 5-3 record in KingCo play, may have missed the playoffs last year due to tiebreakers, but you wouldn’t know it due to attention to the detail and organization the players and coaches have already put together in the first few days of spring drills.

The Wolves will have 28 seniors on the roster this fall. Eastlake head coach Don Bartel, who was hired in 2013, is looking forward to his fourth season on the sidelines.

This year’s group of seniors have only been coached by Bartel and his staff during their high school careers.

“We have a group of seniors that are really attached to the program,” Bartel said. “What is cool is these guys have only known us so there is excitement in that from the standpoint that we know them and they know us, so there is a lot of unspoken stuff that is starting to happen. There is real profound ownership and that part is really cool. Nothing is better than that. We have a cohesive group of guys that love each other and we (coaching staff) got to do our part to make sure we are giving them something to help make them extraordinary.”

The Wolves will have a new signal caller at quarterback this season. Wolves two-year starter Mark Whitley, who graduated in June, will be replaced by quarterback Ben Howard. In 2015, Howard was Whitley’s backup and garnered playing time as a wide receiver on the varsity team.

“I’m going to miss Mark obviously,” Howard said. “It was really exciting watching him. He was crazy on the ground (running quarterback) and made some pretty exceptional plays. I’m going to miss him not as much as a football player, but as a friend on the field. It was really fun having him around.”

Bartel said the bond between Howard and Whitley has helped ready Eastlake’s quarterback for his role on and off the field as the starting quarterback this coming season.

“Ben is doing a great job. He has been leading in and out of the building for a while now,” Bartel said. “I think the relationship he established with Mark was great. The legacy our seniors last year gave us the greatest gift that you could. Those seniors grabbed those juniors and brought them with them. We were a true cohesive team last year. We had genuine relationships and now that is the expectation. Ben is a product of that. He is as experienced as you can get having not taken all those (quarterback) reps. The way he has prepared and what he has decided to do and who he has decided to become is awesome.”

Howard believes the experience the junior class got last season should play a pivotal role in the team’s success in 2016.

“We are excited to finally get after it,” Howard said. “This year’s seniors all got a lot of playing time last year so that was really helpful getting that experience going into our senior year. We have some of the best coaches in the state here so it is going to be exciting. We just have to buckle down, watch film and practice hard. The end goal for everybody obviously is to try to get a state championship but the focus for us each week is to win the next game and see where it goes from there.”

Bartel said the Wolves have benefited from the modern world of technology during spring practice sessions.

The team’s playbook can be accessed via www.hudl.com, in which players can study coverages, formations and offensive and defensive sets before arriving at practice.

“We utilize the stuff online in a way I have never done before,” Bartel said. “Our kids tonight will have all the stuff we are installing for tomorrow where they can watch it all online tonight. By the time they get out here, we hit the ground running. We don’t waste any time walking through anything on the field and we don’t have to stand out here for 25 minutes explaining everything. It’s obvious they are studying because we ran a (defensive) coverage today that we hadn’t even talked about and all of a sudden we were ready to go.”