Eastern Washington lineman Matthew Hewa Baddege continues to work his way back from lower body injury

Heading into his fifth fall season at Eastern Washington, Matthew Hewa Baddege looks at the potential of the team’s offense line and likes what he sees.

“We’re a lot more physical,” he said last week. “Everyone’s taking it a lot more seriously.”

At this point, though, there is still a distance between what his teammates are doing and what Hewa Baddege is doing as he recovers from a lower-body injury he sustained last season.

It is the conundrum of spring ball, which the Eagles will wrap up with their Red-White Game at 6 p.m. Friday at Roos Field: The team wants to get a preview of what its players can do heading into the fall, but it also doesn’t want to sustain or aggravate injuries.

On Saturday, during the team’s first spring scrimmage, that cautionary approach led to many players standing on the sidelines rather than taking live reps.

But players like Hewa Baddege are doing plenty behind the scenes and during practices – as much as they can – even if they stop short of participating in the more visible aspects of spring ball.

“You got guys like (wide receiver) Efton Chism, Brock (Harrison) wasn’t going today,” junior receiver Nolan Ulm said on Saturday. “They’ve got their own things they’re improving on.

“Trust me, guys are in here for a majority of their day. And all people usually see is on the practice field or on the game field, but there are so many hours in our little dungeon film room grinding. There are many other things – film, lift – to get them prepared for fall.”

Since his redshirt season in 2019, Hewa Baddege – listed at 6-foot-7, 320 pounds – has played in 21 games for the Eagles, making seven starts. Five of those starts came in 2021, when he blocked for an offense that ranked first in the FCS in total yards per game.

But concussions ended his season, and he sustained another one at this time last year that limited his contributions during the spring.

He returned in the fall and played in six games only to suffer a lower-body injury in practice that kept him out the rest of the year.

“So far, yeah, I haven’t been partaking too much because I’ve been rehabbing,” Hewa Baddege said. “So far I’ve been doing warmups and anything noncontact.”

Yet that still turns out to be a considerable amount of work in practice for Hewa Baddege and other players who aren’t entirely limited physically, Eagles coach Aaron Best said.

“The nice thing about how we go about practice is some of our review and jog sessions during practice, a lot of those guys that are able to move from the hips down are able to take a ton of reps,” Best said, “even though it’s not a thud or a live (rep).”

Best credited coordinators Jim Chapin (offense) and Jeff Copp (defense) for structuring practices that way.

“(Chapin and Copp) have done a good job allowing those guys to stay in the football mindset of things so they’re not out from the start of practice until the end of practice,” Best said. “We’ve incorporated probably 30 to 40 snaps a day for those guys. … I think it gets them prepared a little bit more knowing they’re not going to be in some of those situational moments.

“We always have guys coming off surgeries in January who are not going to be available in spring, but the more we can get out of those guys, the better we are when we get to August.”

An offshoot of that approach is the team gets to see more of its younger players during live reps in practices and in scrimmages as a way to develop and fill out its depth charts come fall, when the team intends to be as healthy as it can possibly be.

The team returns seven starters on both sides of the ball from last year’s 3-8 team. Those returners have helped set a physical tone during the offseason and during the spring, senior defensive end Brock Harrison said last week, noting that there were “some things we want to change.”

“The physicality this spring has been huge,” Harrison said. “… We’ve raised the intensity a lot. Guys are going harder in practice.

“The older guys are stepping up, taking reps against the other older guys trying to get the best out of each other.”

Yet Hewa Baddege still has that itch to play. He’s been out for about six months now, including two or three months when he said he “just wasn’t able to do anything.”

“It’s a slow process to endure,” he said. “You want your time to come, so you can show why you’re here.”

Hewa Baddege said he thinks all that collective work off the practice field as well as on it is going to pay off for the entire team come fall.

“Everyone’s going hard in practice. Everyone’s pushing each other. Everyone’s doing extras after practice,” he said. “Everyone’s doing it so that come fall, no one sees us as the team we were last year, but they see us as Eastern really is, how we really play.”