Spring Of Transition For West Chester University Football

By Matt Leon

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) --- The West Chester University football team has won a lot of games over the past two seasons.

24 to be exact, including four in the postseason. But a lot of the key players from those teams are now set to graduate so that makes this a very important set of spring workouts for the Golden Rams.

"We're doing some good things," West Chester head coach Bill Zwaan tells KYW Newsradio. "We've got some things to work on, just like everybody does. We're trying to replace some pretty good players who have left. We're trying to find the right guy at quarterback, we've got some offensive line things that we're working on. What I have seen really is we've got a lot of guys coming back defensively, except at the two linebacker spots, but everywhere else we've got guys who have played a lot and they are really moving around and playing pretty well together right now."

Listen: Bill Zwaan with KYW's Matt Leon

Among the players the Golden Rams have said goodbye to are cornerback Al-Hajj Shabazz, linebackers Ronell Williams and Mike Labor and quarterback Sean McCartney. All will be difficult to replace, but the most attention will fall to the quarterback position and who takes over for McCartney - who was a finalist for the Harlon Hill Award (Division II version of the Heisman Trophy) last season.

"The two guys would be Andrew Derr and Pat Moriarty," Zwaan says. "Andrew has played some for us in the past two years and he would be the heir apparent. Pat Moriarty is doing a really nice job here this spring. So they are really the two guys I think at the top of the list as far as who is going to replace Sean. Andrew with a little bit more experience, but Pat's done a really good job. So I think we have two guys who are certainly capable, but that's a position where experience is huge so there's going to be some growing pains there."

The Golden Rams have to replace a lot of talent and they also have to replace a lot of guys who were leaders on the team.

"No question that there's some leadership loss by those guys graduating," Zwaan says. "They were really dominant voices in the locker room, also. So we're sort of trying to find out who is going to step up and be that voice in the locker room. And it may not be all the seniors, some of our junior guys, Ralph Reeves at linebacker, Byron Cooper at defensive end, Derr at quarterback, some of those guys may become the voices in the locker room or at least try to help with the senior leadership. It will be interesting to see how that all plays out."

West Chester plays its spring game on April 25th.

You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattleonkyw.