St. Charles Catholic football coach Frank Monica is about as old school as a guy can be.

Sit with him long enough and he can tell you about his days as a player, before there were pesky rules about safety and hydration.

“Heck, we didn’t have water on the sideline,” he once told me. “We drank out of the mud puddles, and we liked it.”

Those were the days.

So it’s a little surprising that Monica, who is entering his 47th year of coaching and his 21st as head coach of the Comets, is on the cutting edge of football.

It was he who came up with the idea of the Metro 7 on 7 football league some 15 years ago, with another old school football guy, former East St. John coach Larry Dauterive.

Every Wednesday morning, schools from throughout the metro New Orleans area and beyond converge on St. Charles Catholic High school for two hours of scaled down pass plays — quarterbacks and receivers against linebackers and defensive backs.

Mr. Old School Monica says it’s a great way to learn a lot about a team’s strengths and weaknesses.

“You can find out who can play and who can’t,” he said.

Last week, I asked St. John the Baptist Parish coaches to focus on the positives, and they did.

Riverside coach Chris Lachney and Monica touted their returning quarterbacks. East St. John High coach Aldon Foster bragged about his quarterback, his receivers and a couple of his DBs.

Meanwhile, West St. John High coach Brandon Walters was the only coach who actually could talk about how far along his linemen are.

“They’re way ahead of everyone else,” Walters said.

Here is the flip side of the coin: what are the area coaches’ biggest concerns at this point?

Walters is still searching for that quarterback to step up front and center and say, “I’m the guy.”

He also is still looking for his players to come together as a team.

“The biggest thing for us is building some cohesiveness between the offensive guys, developing a better relationship between the quarterback and the receivers and just trying to solidify the positions in the spots we have some holes.”

At East St. John, Foster is thrilled with the potential of his quarterback-receiver combo of Dasmain “Duke” Crosby and Javon Antonio, but he’s having some concerns about his linemen.

“Our concern is up front,” he said. “No matter how much you throw it around, if you can’t block them, it’s all for naught. We don’t have the big, bulky line. Our biggest guy, Jacoby Anderson, is big (he’s 6-foot-5, 320 pounds), but he’s just a sophomore.

“We’ll have some growing pains with him.”

Of course 7 on 7 drills can’t help that because they don’t get to play.

Lachney, the new guy on the block, said there’s really nothing causing him to lose his hair. He’s not being overconfident.

He just takes a different approach to things.

“I look at this as a marathon and not a sprint,” Lachney said.

“Every day when we come here, our job is to get as good as we can at everything we do. We try to identify one thing every day and get better at it.”

Then there’s Monica, who virtually never sees any glass as half full. He is concerned about his secondary, which will be young but not untested thanks to the summer.

He’s also concerned about his young players learning his schemes.

“We’re trying to develop our system so that, when we go to camp, I’m hoping we’re further along than we were in the spring,” he said. “If we’re not, we’re in trouble.”

More than any of that, however, Monica is concerned about the Comets’ move up from Class 2A to Class 3A.

“It’s going to be tough,” he said. “We’re at a whole other level.”

Lori Lyons is sports editor at L’OBSERVATEUR. She can be reached at 985-652-9545 or lori.lyons@lobservateur.com.