As we settle into the relaxing time between recruiting and spring practice, there’s still plenty of good Notre Dame news out there, you just have to dig a little bit deeper to find it.
Here are a few good reads worth checking out as you get your fix of speed-skating, ski-jumping, or women’s hockey.
* Ryan O’Leary over at BlueandGold.com had a nice update on the new training table meals that the football team just started. The key to the program will be sports nutritionist Erika Whitman.
It still amazes me that the athletes were using less than fifty-percent of their allotted meals, although heading to the dining hall after getting out of practice late is the last thing you want to do as a college athlete. Still, the benefits of this will be more than just dietary. Keeping the team together for one more mandatory event will only help team chemistry. I look forward to hearing about the team’s weight gains or losses after these offseason workouts.
* John Heisler at IrishIllustrated.com dug deeper into the 2011 schedule, after news broke earlier this week that Notre Dame and South Florida shifted the date of their game to open the 2011 season for both team.
“With seven home games in these future schedules it seems crazy to have two road games right off the bat,” said Senior Associate Athletic Director For Media and Broadcast Relations John Heisler. “It’s more about the road aspect than who we’re playing. I don’t think we’d want to have two road games to start any year. Jack’s concern is that we ought to find a way to open at home.”
Notre Dame began work on moving South Florida in May and finalized the deal in September. The Bulls, coached by Skip Holtz, come to South Bend on Sept. 3 with the road game at Purdue moving to Oct. 1.
The change lets the Irish avoid opening the 2011 season with back-to-back road games for just the second time in 30 years. The only time it’s happened during that span was Charlie Weis’ first season when Notre Dame won at No. 23 Pittsburgh and No. 3 Michigan.
* NDNation.com is running a series of pieces on new coach Brian Kelly and leadership. When building a case for Kelly and trying to understand why he’s been able to take unheralded teams to new heights, Scott Engler points to Kelly’s work developing players. More pointedly, he points to the similarities between Kelly’s philosophies and former head coach Lou Holtz’s.
Kelly’s philosophy centers around the coaches getting to know his players intimately and transforming them across all five development areas. When people say he sounds like Lou, it’s because Kelly’s literally taken a page out of Lou’s book. In “Winning Every Day,” Lou states that he every player needs to know the answers to three questions about his coaches and his peers: 1. Can I trust you? 2. Are you committed to excellence? 3. Do you care about me?
That’s Lou, here’s Kelly describing his success (see a parallel?), “We did it by working on winning every single day. If I wait till Saturday to work on winning we’d win as many as we lose. The very first day we worked on winning... and what do you now know about winning you can’t start winning until you stop losing (getting rid of bad habits) and you can build that every single day... our kids cared about each other, they trustedeach other, they were committed.’