LEWISTON – The pitfalls that trip up prospective high school football players on the first day of practice are legendary.

Two-a-days beckon, at least until school reconvenes in two weeks, so begin carbohydrate loading and hydrating about three nights ahead of schedule. Eat a balanced breakfast, and hope it stays down. And for heaven’s sake, don’t dream of taking a nap between the morning and afternoon sessions, because you’re bound to sleep through the alarm.

Making the transition from hitting the snooze button to hitting the five-man blocking sled isn’t an assignment for the meek. So naturally, after Lewiston High School coach Bill County and his staff handed out helmets, prodded the troops to the edge of the practice field and instructed them to take a knee, you could be sure that a serious soliloquy was in store.

The topic of that weighty discussion was neither the cover-two defensive scheme nor a position-by-position breakdown of the Blue Devils’ first opponent in 18 days.

Try locker room music.

“I’ll be honest with you guys. I once coached a team that won a state championship, but they were into the country thing. That drove me nuts. There are only so many times you can listen to a song about a dog,” County said, eliciting a few laughs.

Starting his 14th autumn as a head coach, evenly split between Leavitt and Lewiston, County then took advantage of his captive, loosened-up audience to make his point.

“If it’s a song filled with f-bombs and it’s about doing whatever with your girlfriend, we’re not having it,” said the coach. “And the other thing is the guy who’s the last one out of the locker room leaving the thing on at full volume. We’re not having that, either, or there won’t be any music.”

Monday was the first permissible practice day for football, soccer, field hockey, golf and cross country teams sanctioned by the Maine Principals’ Association.

As for the urban legends about that day and its tradition of separating the fit from the fitful, well, they’re only partially correct.

There was plenty of perspiring between the athletes’ arrival shortly after sunrise and their departure to dinner, but Monday was also a day dedicated to clarifying expectations. The ones presented to the football team sounded elementary enough. Show up on time. Practice if you plan to play. Pick up after yourself. Treat the trainer and the managers with respect.

“Maybe you’ll make enough money someday to boss people around your mansion, and that’s your business,” County said. “But here, we’re not going to tolerate screaming at somebody the second they don’t get a water bottle in your hand when you want it.”

Of course, sometimes the housekeeping duties and the hard work go hand-in-hand.

While the football team broke up after County’s state of the locker room address and went about the business of learning at least a half hour’s worth of stretches, more than 40 field hockey hopefuls circled clipboard-wielding coach Norma Heidrich on the nearby track.

She’ll get around to teaching the values of teamwork and mutual respect, too, but Heidrich’s first expectation of the fall season was concrete and well-documented. In order to make the varsity squad, Lewiston field hockey players are required to run two miles in 18 minutes or less.

The coach admitted that her fitness guideline is more a motivational tool than an ultimatum.

“Last year I think we only had six make it, so that was a bit of a problem,” said Heidrich, knowing that it will take at least three times that many players to field a full team with reserves.

As of 10 a.m., there were more crimson faces and sweat-soaked hair scrunchies than registered times under the threshold. A few juniors and seniors made the cut, but Erin Glann and Olivia Fournier’s sophomore class couldn’t yet boast of anyone averaging a nine-minute mile.

“The sun came out and it got hotter today,” Glann said. “That didn’t help.”

Glann and Fournier predicted that eight seniors and 12 juniors will move the Blue Devils upward in the Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference, arguably the state’s toughest field hockey league in recent years.

“Other teams lost a lot of seniors,” Fournier said.

Over on the gridiron, where the hitting and sprints were scheduled to begin earnestly later in the day, expectations are sky-high.

Lewiston hasn’t reached the regional championship game since 2002, but the return of stellar senior running back Jared Turcotte and a surprising amount of team success in last year’s injury-plagued campaign had County preparing his pupils for the best at Monday’s briefing.

“We were one extra point away from having the best record in our conference, and we’re at least a notch better than that now,” he said. “Men, there is absolutely no reason we cannot win a state championship.”

Makes you wonder what might be playing on the stereo at that post-game celebration.