Lawrence High's Trey Georgie, front, and Nate Koehn move through a line of pads as they work on skill development during Lawrence High's football camp on Monday, June 1, 2015.

After ending the 2014 season with a 35-7 setback in the first round of the playoffs to eventual state champion Shawnee Mission East, Lawrence High’s football team has its aspirations set to make a much deeper postseason run in 2015.

The Lions kicked off their annual summer football camp Monday with a 7 a.m. session of weights, followed by various drills on the field.

LHS coach Dirk Wedd said having a senior-laden team helped get the Lions off to a quick start to the summer.

“We’re pretty experienced, so we took the training wheels off pretty early,” Wedd said. “It all comes down to our seniors taking ownership of the team as quickly as possible.”

With Amani Bledsoe and Trey Georgie anchoring the defensive line and Price Morgan and Tanner Green returning at linebacker, the Lions figure to have a big and athletic front seven.

“We need to be a dominant defense,” Wedd said. “We need to be an old-time Lawrence High defense that flies around the field and strikes you. I think we have the personnel to do that.”

The Lions will be plenty deep at the linebacker position with Morgan, Green, Konner Kelley and Alan Clothier, who will be making the transition from defensive back.

“Anything that comes near us, we’re just going to stop them,” Green said. “We know we have the ability. As long as we do what we need to do, we’ll be all right.”

Clothier will be back under center at quarterback for the Lions, and Wedd is excited to see what improvement the dual-threat QB can make after playing his first full season in 2014.

“We’ll give him a little bit more freedom both in the passing game and running the football, because he’s an outstanding runner, also,” Wedd said.

“We’ve got to find three or four guys that can catch the ball, and more importantly, we need to find three or four wide receivers that will block, too.”

Ivan Hollins and Luke Padia are two early candidates at wideout for Wedd, but the Lions will also count heavily on Morgan at tight end and the 1-2 punch of JD Woods and Trey Moore to help out in the passing game.

Wedd was encouraged by Woods and Moore’s performance in track throughout the spring, as both qualified and placed at the state meet in multiple events.

“What I love about those two kids is that they use track to make themselves better in football,” Wedd said.

“They’re not one-sport superstars, where they think they’re too good to play football because they’re star track guys or star football players and not run track. They love both sports, and they don’t drop weight to get faster.”

Even though the Lions posted a .500 record in 2014, expectations are sky-high for the Lions, and that was evident in the spring with numerous NCAA Div. I coaches checking out the likes of Bledsoe, Morgan and Georgie.

Wedd said it will be a challenge to temper those expectations and take things practice by practice and game by game.

“We need to humble them a little bit and grasp a concept of they’ve proven nothing and have a lot to prove,” Wedd said. “We’ve got a long ways to go, and it’s going to be up to them to get us there.”

The Lions will launch their 2015 campaign on Sept. 4 against Blue Valley West, a team the Lions lost to, 37-13, to begin last season.

Kelley hopes the growing pains of the past two seasons will pay dividends this year.

“We were 5-5 last year, and we just have to build off of that,” Kelley said.

“Hopefully we’ll come out on top.”