Players lead the way in summer
College coaches cannot oversee practices from the end of spring practice until fall workouts start in August.
So coaches must rely on team leaders to run voluntary summer workouts. It's up to players like last year's Heisman Trophy winner, Tim Tebow, to get teams on the same page.
"In the offseason when you're out there in pass scale and you're running, that's when you get your timing down for the fall,"
Tebow said. "That's when you get who is going to play down and everything. It's critical."
Spring practice is big. But Tebow, and many other college players like him, believe the summer is even bigger. It's during that time of year he gets to know his teammates and their tendencies.
"You'll even pick up the tempo, pick up the intensity in the summer,"
Tebow said. "The whole year you are building up. In the offesason you are doing different things, but you are building up, getting ready for August, just making sure everybody's ready, everybody's healthy, everybody knows what they're doing."
"It's not the time in the fall, in two-a-days, for the running back to step with the wrong foot. By then you have to know what you're doing and be able to do it so you can get work in."
And if a team comes into August out of shape and not technically sound because it goofed off in June and July?
"You've got problems,"
Tebow said.
That means coaches have to have a lot of faith. Star players, the team leaders, must tell the rest of the team how to get ready. Coaches can meet with players in the team's facility. But they are not allowed on the practice field in the summer months. The NCAA does allow trainers to oversee workouts, for health reasons.
Conditioning is also a priority. A bigger, stronger and smarter team that starts preseason practices in August has a huge advantage over other teams that didn't have such a great summer.
"The big thing is, give your players a game plan for the summer and trust that they'll follow it,"
South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier said.
That makes the Tim Tebows of the SEC just as valuable in June and July as they are in September and October.
