Penn Wraps Up Spring Football Workouts Saturday

By Matt Leon

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) --- The University of Pennsylvania football team will cap off its spring practice sessions tomorrow with the annual spring game.

This has been a spring of transition for the Quakers with longtime defensive coordinator Ray Priore taking over as head coach after the retirement of Al Bagnoli, who, after a brief stint in athletic administration at Penn, took over as the head coach at Columbia.

Priore talks about his first spring in charge of the Quakers.

"Gone real smooth," Priore tells KYW Newsradio. "Never know what to expect on the first time going through. But I think the little things we wanted to focus in on with both a new offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator, which was getting the fundamentals and the basics of our systems down has been successful to date."

Listen: Ray Priore with KYW's Matt Leon

The new offensive coordinator is John Reagan, who spent last season at the University of Kansas. The new man in charge of the defense is Bob Benson, who had been the defensive coordinator at Albany.

The Quakers are coming off a frustrating 2-8 season in 2014 but Priore likes what he has seen here in spring of 2015.

"It's been nice to see our quarterback position with Alek Torgersen coming back, you know sophomore year, first time starter (in 2014), watching him progress," Priore says. "Andrew Lisa, who is his back-up, has taken a nice step as well with Nick Rittenhouse. That's a critical position. And then on the defensive side of the football, it was great to see our linebackers, I would say most notable watching them progress through the spring. Everybody made their strides. We have to continually keep on getting better as we work through the rest of the spring and the summer."

Togersen had a solid season under center as a sophomore last season, throwing for 2,689 yards and 14 touchdowns.

As far as tomorrow's spring game is concerned, Priore talks about what he's looking for.

"You want to see success on both, obviously, first-team offense and first-team defense," Priore says. "Have the kids take the next step. Play as a team. I think our key word this whole spring has been family. Coming together as a family, caring about each other, playing really, really gritty. Grinding it out. Good things happen to people that work hard. And that has been the thing we've been trying to instill with the guys since the winter program and through the spring."

Priore will make his debut as Penn head coach on September 19th when the Quakers visit Lehigh.

You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattleonkyw.