The days leading up to training camp are always interesting to me. I don’t care where it is – there are always problems that need to be cleaned up in the final 24-36 hours. Whether it is Kutztown, Arizona State, the Lions or even at the major power that we are here at Moravian College there are going to be last minute screw ups.
There is no calm before the storm anywhere in the country as training camp opens. (It is generally a small tropical depression before the storm.) Every head coach I have ever been around will lose his mind (not as badly as they do on game day) before we even get the team into the dorms.
As a head coach Jeff is no exception. The poor guy has to handle so much BS that it is amazing he still finds a way to coach the football team. If someone breaks a window in the dorms, if someone drives their car on the lawn, if someone gets into a skirmish – first guys blamed are the football players here at MC.
Actually our guys are really a pretty good bunch of young men – yeah we have our problems like everyone else. Occasionally one of our heroes has thrown an illegal party – drank a beer on campus, fell asleep on a porch walking back from the OBT late at night…but on the whole they are just college students..
None-the-less Jeff has a lot on his plate. So consequentially he has some melt downs in the hours preceding training camp. (Murphy’s Law!)
This year several players reportedly hadn’t paid their bills or cleaned up their financial aid packages. The administrators in one office pretty much said those guys cannot come to training camp unless things get squared away. Nice to know 48 hours before camp opens.
When 42 of your 90 guys are going to be held out you might have a small problem fielding a team let alone having a practice. But come on, if I was in the bursar’s office and 42 people had some kind of problem I would have tried to find out what the problem was a week ago. But that’s why they are administrators and not coaches.
Of course Jeff has to find out what the trouble was and fix it. Or…we won’t have a team. Naturally he is going to be a little worried.
He comes into the football office where we are basically eating pizza and drinking beer – well maybe not. Probably watching film and fixing playbook etc.
Jeff came in – lost his mind….then found it behind his desk. Assigned everyone a handful of guys to call. A giant pain in the ass of course. But we find out that the majority of the players were just waiting on the release of their grants and loans. Ironically a lot of this money was coming from the school and yet Moravian didn’t even follow up and find this out on there own – just give it to Jeff.
So a job that should have been handled by the institution had to be handled by the coaches. The coaches were supposed to be working on football, but instead were tracking down players at the last minute.
Yeah well….that’s the way it is.
Early quiet in athletic facilities – everything empty. No one in the weight room..on the field running. But give it another 12 hours or so and thongs are going to get pretty busy around here.
