D3football.com Podcast 407 Extra: David Blake, Bethany (W.Va.) [15:06-20:08]

the way our office looks. So everything that we do has to have a point in a purpose, site sounds and the smells, right? So when you step into our office, you know, all of our recruiting visits kind of funnel through our office space at one point and that's where I kind of do my finishing touches when I have a group through and we have, you know, the couch is set up. The TV, the dry erase board, and it feels like there's somewhere between a living room and a barber shop and we always have the TVs on all the time. So when you come in our office, there's always a vibe, there's always juice. And that's why I asked the families. I said, you know, why are we all in here together? And I said, I wanted to feel like, you know, grandma's house, you know, on Thanksgiving. I want it to be that family type vibe where, you know, we may not always see how we might not see each other all the time, but, you know, we're in this room, you know, you know, we got the TV on, we got the big screen on always, you know, some type of ESPN classic type game always on there. And, you know, I made sure all the coaches had TVs in their office. So throughout the day, you know, there's always everybody's office has some money. You might have the 1988 Masters on. You might have a, you know, 1940s Yankees game, but there's always something on the TV. The other thing we have done is the honing the details of how we coach, how we play, how we do everything, this will make more sense too. So on my, you know, we have 77 months of deployment under our belt as a staff, okay. You know, so there's a lot of high, high intensity of point and purpose, the detail. So when you go in our locker room, we don't want our locker room to just look like, you know, it is oh shoot, one of our boosters are coming through, one of our alumni is coming through, hey boys hurry up and field data, so it has to be clean. The center's a standard. So when you walk into our locker room, you know, we got the standard, you know, helmet cubby here that's got the locker here, you know, like the little, you know, quote by 18 locker space right there, then it's got the trunk on the bottom. Yeah. Well, that helmet is set face mask to the right, seated two and a half inches from the leading edge of the locker. All right. The jersey is on the back left hook. If it's off the loop, the loop is on the back right hook. Everything has a purpose for the way it is. There's no extra gloves, there's no extra socks, there's no extra pants, nothing. In our main locker room, there's 99 lockers. During spring ball, we had 91 guys. Every locker looked the exact same. And so that's, you know, where the details, you ask where they may be lost or where they're at. No, I found guys that know what that level of detail and success it looks like. And so that's how we've been carrying it forward. How have the guys been taken to that? I am not going to draw any conclusions based on who coached previously. I, you know, I just know that, you know, you come in with a, you know, a specific set of things you want to see done in a specific way. For, and that's always going to be different than what they've experienced before and what they've come up through, you know. Absolutely. And, you know, in the previous said coach, Brian Robbins, he's a friend of mine, he's one of my buddies. And he's one of the guys that, you know, when the job came open, we were talking about, you know, go forward and not go forward kind of thing and, you know, he's, you know, I love brains. But, you know, so, so coming into it, you know, a new program, how are we going to do it? How are we going to, you know, reset it to kind of, you know, my vision, if you will. And so what I wanted to do was lead from the front from the very beginning to show that I was in the mud with them. Okay. And so what I mean by that is, it was in that what we'd call the Navy on structure led runs. So for about the first two and a half, three weeks, we're back on campus in the winter. We didn't start the weight room then. It was kind of more of a game of fall of the leader. All right. And so we would, you know, we'd meet in our indoor facility. We'd start our, you know, kind of conditioning circuit there. Then those guys, you know, the days it was too cold, it was, you know, negative degrees outside. We were inside. Have you ever been in Bethany? I have not. I have not. So, yeah, I have seen Bethany play on the road. And other than that, my only transit across West Virginia is transit across the Panhandle, you know. Stop in some time. You know, it's. We've realized as, you know, people coming through on visits that, they don't realize how beautiful the campuses and really how nice our facilities are, you know, our weight rooms. You know, I've been a division one school is all across the country, visiting indoor coaching and, you know, our stuff is just as nice as anybody else's. You know, the stadium shot is really pretty, for example, too, right? I mean, absolutely. Yeah. You know, it's, it's a, you know, division three. So inherently, the stadiums are going to be a little bit smaller. So is the stadium all big and powerful looking like a major division one? No, but it serves its purpose for the, you know, for the conference in the competition. But so back to the workouts. Yeah. So I basically, we let a circuit where all the guys had to keep up with me and I'd have coaches in the back leading up the rear. So we'd start off the offensive line in front, quarterbacks right behind for the quarterbacks to push the O line, D line chasing the quarterbacks, then they have to keep up with me and I was the rabbit. So we go up the steps. You know, we got a catwalk, you know, where all the offices are up on the second story