What Hugh Freeze said about Auburn football's first spring practice
AUBURN — Auburn football coach Hugh Freeze used three adjectives to describe what it was like to host his first spring practice as the Tigers' new coach: Incredible, beautiful and exciting.
One of the main sources of his optimism? The effort his team displayed.
"I thought they had pretty good energy," Freeze said Monday evening. "We don't know what we're doing yet or how to do it, but they certainly brought a great energy to practice. If we could repeat that for the next 14 (spring practices), we will absolutely get better."
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Freeze tried to make his way around from position to position as much as possible, keeping an eye on what he called "the little things" like breaking the huddle, the tempo at which the team played and the attention to detail "starting this morning from class attendance all the way through practice."
"It's a mental grind," Freeze said. "It takes mental toughness. That doesn't come natural to a lot of people. Not just football players, but to a lot of people. I think that is the No. 1 thing that I want to get out of spring ball would be that we understand that the little things truly are the main thing."
But it's not only the players who are adjusting. Freeze's new staff features just two assistants retained from the Bryan Harsin era, and while some newcomers followed him from Liberty to Auburn, many didn't. Receivers coach Marcus Davis came from Georgia Southern, Jake Thornton was at Ole Miss last season and neither of the new coordinators − OC Philip Montgomery and DC Ron Roberts − ever worked with or for Freeze before, as a few examples.
“I like our staff a lot and I think we have good chemistry," Freeze said. "Are we where we want to be (or) as far along as we’d like to be? Probably not. Because we just had such a short window to try to decide exactly what are we going to try to do this spring. We have coaches from a lot of different staffs and backgrounds, and now we've got to melt all this together and try to be all on the same page and one voice.
"The last thing you want is kids hearing from too many voices that are not saying the same thing. … I firmly believe it’s impossible for me or any of the coaches to give something away that we don’t already possess. If we say this is the culture we want to portray, then we must possess it. So, I like our chemistry, and now we've got to be great teachers. We’ll see from Day 1 to Day 2 to Day 3, can we get some stuff cleaned up?”
The Tigers will practice Wednesday and Friday this week before taking a one-week hiatus for spring break. They'll practice 11 more times after that and put a bow on the spring period with A-Day on April 8.
"I do think we've got to develop a culture (or) council type mentality at some point that we can depend upon to say to anyone on the team, 'Hey, we're better than that. That's really not the way we do that.' Do we have a few guys that I think are headed in that direction? Yes. But we need more. But that's mostly every time you take over a program and you start changing the way you practice, the expectations.
"... I get reports every day from our strength staff and academic staff and training staff, and we've still got a ways to go, truthfully, in the standard to which we want to operate. And we're going to count on the guys that I do get the good reports (on) and hopefully after about three to five practices, we'll talk about some names."
Richard Silva is the Auburn athletics beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. He can be reached via email at rsilva@gannett.com or on Twitter @rich_silva18.
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