HOLLYWOOD — The number Friday morning was 77.9.

That is the lowest reading of camp, taken as always at midfield by a man holding a small gray instrument over his head for four minutes before anyone is allowed to run, and it landed on the morning Hollywood High has been pointing at since late July: the first intrasquad scrimmage of the preseason. Full pads and live contact have been legal since the section’s acclimatization calendar cleared day ten earlier in the week; Friday was the first morning the Sheiks used the permission — first-team offense against first-team defense, about forty snaps of actual football, starting a few minutes after six.

“Two and a half weeks of football-adjacent activities,” said Delroy Fenwick, in his sixth season as head coach. “This morning we got to play some. Nobody in the history of this program has ever been early to stretching. Today they were early.”

The 6 a.m. schedule, Fenwick’s own rule since afternoon readings cost the team most of a week last summer, has grown a culture around itself. Behind the sideline rope Friday sat a dozen lawn chairs and roughly as many travel mugs, parents and a few grandparents watching live tackling at an hour usually reserved for the freeway. The parent volunteer’s table held its usual water, ice towels and scale. With the instrument reading in the seventies, nobody came close to the two-percent body-weight drop that triggers what Fenwick calls a conversation. The scale got used anyway. Everybody in, everybody out.

The first live snap of the year was a false start, which Fenwick described as traditional. The third was better: Xavier Poole, the senior quarterback who threw for better than two thousand yards last season, hung a ball down the seam that his tight end caught forty yards later with nobody within reach.

Then the morning belonged, for a while, to Daniel Okotie, a sophomore defensive back who opened camp on nobody’s list of names to learn. Okotie jumped a slant in the second series and intercepted Poole clean, and four snaps later got a hand on a corner route that most sophomores would have watched. The defense hollered. The lawn chairs applauded.

“I had to look at my own roster,” Fenwick said. “That’s the best thing that can happen in a scrimmage. Some kid making the older kids mad.”

Poole took it about as well as quarterbacks take these things. “He’s fast and he’s annoying,” he said, meaning it as a compliment, mostly. The scale had better news for him: 198 pounds Friday, two into the nine his coach ordered between him and a playing weight of 205. “Two down, seven to go,” Poole said. “The job helps — I’m around food all day. The going to bed at nine does not get easier. My little cousin stays up later than I do.”

The district maintenance crew that wants the same morning window arrived at 7:40 and waited by the gate, as it has all camp, until the rope came down. The girls’ program had the field at nine.

Elsewhere in the athletic office, a cardboard box arrived this week and has not been opened. It holds the helmet decals the Sheiks will wear this season for Marvin Teale, who coached the program for twenty-six seasons and died July 19 at 88. Fenwick has put the box on a shelf in his office and intends to leave it there, taped shut, until the week of the crosstown game.

“It’s a box of stickers. It’ll keep,” he said, and then, after a silence he did not seem to plan: “He met me three times and talked to me like I’d played for him. It can sit there until it matters. Then it’ll matter.”

The game the decals are waiting for is the preseason meeting with John Marshall at the end of the month, played for a foot of dented brass on a walnut base whose origin story the two schools have never agreed on — and which Teale, famously, argued Marshall had right. Fenwick declined to discuss the game on the grounds that it was two weeks away, and then discussed it for a while anyway, walking to the parking lot, confirming among other things that the 1988 team’s 1-and-9 record will go up on the locker-room wall that week, with no explanation offered.

By 8:30 the field was empty and 77.9 was in the log the section can audit. Practice Saturday was off. Monday is at six.