Spavital Speaks: Academics, Recruiting and Conditioning during COVID-19

It’s been two weeks since most sporting events were cancelled due to concerns over the coronavirus, but that doesn’t mean the sports world completely stopped turning.

College coaches across the country have had to severely alter their approaches in the wake of cancelled games, practices and classes. While college football isn’t in season, spring practice was underway when the cancellations began, leaving most programs’ 15 allowed spring practices unfulfilled.

For Texas State coach Jake Spavital, his Bobcats completed just five spring practices. It was more than others but less than some, including some conference foes that actually completed all 15 spring practices.

A young coach entering his second season ever at the helm, Spavital comments on life as a coach during the coronavirus scare.

General statement on the team:

I thought we were making a lot of strides as a program, as a team. Obviously, it was a new identity, a new team. 13 new guys that are midyear. I think that we’ve made a lot of strides on the direction that we wanted to go. The thing that I’m pleased with, is in our first five practices, we put in everything. It’s probably the most I’ve installed ever in the first five practices because I kind of sensed the need to, that we’ve got to amp it up and we’ve got to move forward.

I thought these kids were handling it pretty good. I thought we had a lot of confidence offensively and an understanding of what it’s supposed to look like. I am pleased with how the team has been competing, the direction and the mindset. The installs, the competitive side of things that we’re doing, we were making a lot of great strides as a program.

So now you hit this kind of adversity of the coronavirus where, what do we do next? Really the approach that we’ve taken as a program is one of making sure that we’re pretty much glorified academic advisors because everything is moved online and remote destinations and there’s been a lot of discussion. There’s a lot of monitoring. James Sherman has done an unbelievable job for us and having contact with these kids, do they have the resources necessary to do online stuff? You know, how are we going to hold these kids accountable and make sure that they’re doing their work? And that’s been pretty difficult but our kids are ready. Like I’ve said, there’s been a lot of great communication and that’s the main thing I keep emphasizing is that you have to over communicate everything that you do from here on out because everybody’s kind of in different locations.

Academics, Recruiting and Conditioning

So our number one thing right now is making sure that we’re getting the resources available, make sure that they have everything that they need to be able to pass their classes, and there are a lot of checks and balances going on. Just making sure that they’re doing the work.

The number two thing right now for the coaching staff is recruiting. I think this is a unique time for us. Where I think a lot of this comes down to is a likability of staff. So we’re putting a huge emphasis on making sure that we’re in constant contact with kids all day.

The thing that you’ve probably seen is these zoom teleconferences, these video teleconferences. These are the deals that we’re on nonstop. You know, we do staff meetings, you know, I have 26 people get on a staff meeting or 27 people and we talked in the morning briefly about any updates. Anything that we need to accomplish and then we go into recruiting meetings offensively and defensively and we watch recruits and we have discussions through our video conferencing and then next week we start watching cut ups.

Eventually, next week, we’ll start meeting with our players in conferences, but when it gets down to it is the recruiting side of it is very important for us because we got to make sure that we’re just in constant contact and we’re evaluating and we’re making sure our databases are still getting the correct balance because you’re going to miss the spring evaluations on these kids. They (the NCAA) haven’t really made a decision on what they’re going to do with summer camps.

So we’ve had a lot of dialogue and discussions to kind of figure out what we can do to make sure we can get these evals right. So we’re really just building databases of people we love, you know, staying in contact with people that we’ve offered, people that we’re on. But also creating a hot list of guys that have potential offers. You’re just kind of missing the evaluation part of it so whenever they give us that time to eval where we need to go see it in person, we’ve already got to kind of map them out.

Again, this is a unique time. You’ve got to be able to kind of just react with it and make sure that we’re having, like I said, we’re overly communicating, just to make sure that we’re all on the same page.

But, like I said, it’s academics first, and second is our recruiting. And the third is our strength and conditioning. These guys are doing everything remotely. You know, doing more body type stuff, doing circuits.

Our strength conditioning coach (Damon Harrington), he’s put together a Facebook page where he can post workouts and these guys can have a lot of dialogue, checking in and out. Or if they have a scale, they’re weighing in and out just so we can keep monitoring what these kids are doing.

Because again, like I said, we were making strides as a program before this thing here. From our nutrition standpoint, we are getting bigger, faster and stronger than we’ve ever had. These guys have put on good weight. I think Blake Aragon had put on like almost 20 some odd pounds. How do we hold him accountable and stay on him because the kid does so well and made so many strides and you don’t want to see him lose anything, especially with the investment that we’ve put into nutrition.

Coach Harrington does a great job with these kids, and giving ideas and working with them, and seeing how we can help them. So really, those are the three things right now that we’re focusing on. You know, probably wait another week and kind of see where this goes. And then we’ll start getting into virtual meetings with our players.

Right now it’s just about academics, making sure we’re all accountable and getting them to pass their classes. And recruiting as hard as we can, and still trying to keep them accountable from a strength conditioning standpoint. Then we’ll start diving in deeper on how long this is going to take, how long we’re allowed to be away from these kids. And we’ll start doing more virtual meetings and things of that nature.

I’m sitting here talking a lot. It’s just there’s been a lot of discussion, a lot of meetings, a lot of everything involved with this because it’s just a unique time but you got to make sure that our kids are being held accountable. I think that we’re probably one of the better ones out there in the country. I’ve talked to probably about 15 teams about what they’re doing and how they are piecing together a system.

Progress in the spring

I told the entire offensive staff, and I know my brother was doing the same with defense, that we’ve got to put everything in. Even if their heads are spinning, we’ve got to get the installs in. I want all the football we possibly get in our five practices before spring break.

So we’ve got like 90% of the offense in right now. And I’m saying we’re running counter, GTS and outside zones and inside zones. And quick game and max throws and train game and all sorts of stuff. We’ve got a lot in and we got a lot to teach. And I think they’ve gotten a taste of what it’s supposed to look like.

We’ve talked it through. We’ve had some good meetings about it now. You know, we just got to be able to react whenever they decide the next step for us. They might give us 10 more practices back. I’m hearing things like they could do like an OTA-type practices in June, like the NFL or XFL. There’s all sorts of ways they can go. So I am pleased with having those five practices because we got a lot of quality work out of it.

I’d love to get the 10 practices back because you will get like Arkansas State and Coastal Carolina already done that. There’s been no, yeah. So if you look at it and take it just to be fair for everybody to allow them to at least get their 15 practices in, in some capacity.

Accommodating an uncertain future

(Director of Player Development) James Sherman is saying he’s in constant contact with them. He’s trying to find out the guys that have the means necessary to actually do online courses. Like you got a lot of kids that don’t have computers, we got a lot of kids that don’t have Wi Fi access, you know? You got to put that into play, which is common everywhere in college football.

So there’s been a lot of discussions on it like this whole past, you know, really two weeks have strictly been on how to actually get these kids comfortable like we got to move kids out of the dorms, you know, these kids are on spring break. Do we bring back Micah Hilts from Colorado and Cedric Case from Nebraska. And do we bring these kids down and move them out? And, you know, Seamus (O’Kelly), you know, he can’t go he can’t travel anywhere, he can’t go back home. So where do you put him at? Like, are there other needs for means of living? Do these kids have laptops? Can we check out laptops or is there capability of doing that? How can we get to, you know there’s just so many moving parts where, again, adding our staff, being in year two and understanding how everything works.

The effect on recruiting

Man, I think, you know, I’m a pretty I’m a big glass-half-full type of guy. I think it can also help us a lot. I think there’s going to be some guys that hide, like the Kham Winters of the world that kind of slipped through the cracks. The DeJordan Masks, that I think are two really good players for us right now that just unfortunately people just didn’t really, like really catch on until late. I think this could play into our plan pretty well.

So I look at it both ways. I do. I think there’s going to be some guys that are already out there that maybe have like two or three offers that are going to end up blowing up because there’s not very many other evals out there. So we’re kind of looking at where we’re getting the feeler through the guys that have got offers out there and are kind of, you know, a hot name. And then we’re trying to get feelers out there for guys we wanted to go eval in the spring but might just fall into our lap. We’ve just got to be ready for it all.

Making sure players stay in shape

You know, it’s hard. I’m saying you can really – what’s the saying, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t get them to drink it.

We’re setting up workouts, we’re doing things like “here’s your app, make sure you check in with us to do everything,” but you never know the intensity that they’re doing it. You never know if they’re actually doing the reps or not. We’re just trying to be proactive and get them something that they can do and try to stay in shape and see if we can we can make them accountable for doing the workout.

I remember doing those like summer workouts and stuff when I was in college or the workouts from spring break. You know, you just never did it with the intensity that you typically would if you had a 6 am run with all your buddies at Bobcat Stadium.

Quarterback competition before the cancellations

I haven’t done crazy examples yet of competition with these kids, but I made it where Cedric Case and Jaylen Gibson and Tyler Vitt and Brady McBride all ended up having an equal amount of reps there the first five practices and they got opportunities to run every single play. It took a lot of work and a lot of time to script this out properly. But I wanted it to be fair for these kids to be able to rep every single play they would’ve got with the ones and twos and just make sure you’re getting where you go with it.

It’s kind of hard to completely evaluate what we’ve gotten through our live situations right now because we’re also moving O-linemen in and out, receivers in and out, so you’re not stuck with guys that may not run that route the best way or not.

So it’s been a pretty healthy competition, in my mind. I think all four of them have done a really good job at understanding it. I’ve been throwing them in the fire. I put a lot of pressure on these kids. What people don’t realize is I put more pressure on these quarterbacks than anybody in this program because they got to communicate everything out. And it’s very difficult to do but once they are able to do that they’re going be able to handle anything, especially if they go into the NFL. It’s been fun watching it go down I think. I think that Vitt and Brady are competing pretty hard against each other.

Staying busy

We have a program called Pro Football focus that we got set up which I’ve always used. It’s a great little program where I’ve gotten every single NFL game that was played last year, every XFL game, every AFL game and the majority of college. I watched nine NFL teams and I watched every third and one play yesterday.

You can watch all the two minutes, four minutes, you can watch. Like, I want to see Drew Brees throw all of his quick game. I want to see the DeAndre Hopkins run all slant routes. You can filter it however you want to. It’s pretty fascinating. It is. It’s incredible.

So I just sit at home and I get on my iPad and I just go down a rabbit hole of four minutes and two minutes and third downs and behind the chains and two-point plays and all sorts of stuff. Try to find anything that’s going to match what we’re doing. So it was good I got those five practices. Kind of have an idea of what you can and can’t do, especially the new guys. And what guys are jumping out and how can you build packages around them.