D3football.com Podcast 407 Extra: David Blake, Bethany (W.Va.) [25:08-30:11]

piece, but we're still, you know, intensely teaching. And so, you know, then we go to pit stop. We had car sounds playing so zoom, zoom, zoom, sounds like an ass car. That's where all of our guys would go to the sideline. All right. And then we would continue that, that, you know, that kind of cycle hallway throughout practice. So after we started, you know, getting through practice and our guys were like, Oh, shoot, this is, you know, this is how we, this is where we got to be on the field. Then we pulled the rug out from underneath of them, now practicing silent. Oh. All right. So we taught them where to be, how to be the tempo of that period. Now it's doing silence. And you took the cue away. Yeah. We took the cue away because I was going to say like you can then, you know, now that you have, you know, kind of been through this spring practice period, you can kind of bring back those music cues and immediately invoke a certain mood or a certain set of a certain bit of intensity for all of these guys just by putting on a style of, a style of music right? Absolutely. Wow. You know, it's kind of crazy as, you know, some of our most grueling workouts, you know, during the spring session, you know, you know, some of those, you know, those, you know, intense, you know, morning workouts that, you know, all the kids always remember in the sprints and all the, you know, that where you really built the team, you know, in January February, we had, you know, guys, you know, sweating out to, Whitney Houston, I'll always love you. You know, when you got an offensive line with 300 plus pound dude, Brent, trying to give everything he has to finish through the line, the chorus hits of Whitney Houston, I'll always love you. You know, it hits a little bit different or what is it? Starship. Nothing's going to stop us now. We, you know, we listened that one day for an hour and a half straight while we. For those exers who are listening to this podcast, I know there's at least, I can vouch for that being in my middle school soundtrack. Yeah. So some of the obscure sounds, you know, you know, that's, you know, we didn't want artificial stimulus built off music. We wanted to basically invoke a violent intentions no matter what the crowd, no matter what the dynamic was. And so, you know, we, I got to read off my, so our DJ at practice, what do we, we give him a title? And I got to read this off because it's quite unique. All right. He is the director of intensified experiential neuroscience director of intensified experiential neuroscience. All right. That's what we call our GA that plays the music of practice. That's awesome. I am going to shout out my high school social studies and psych teacher, Mr. Anderson, Lee Anderson, as I harken back to junior year of high school to say you are setting up this whole operand conditioning, BF Skinner kind of thing with your, with your program here. No, maybe not. I don't know. How did you come about this? Though, like, you know, how did you develop this? Is this something that you picked up along the way or this pieces of things you've seen at various programs? Is this from, you know, is this from, from basic training? What's this from? You know, it blends navy and, you know, it's the different place. I've been in my football travels, you know, we, that's kind of how I coach, you're, you're going to get a blend of the air crew, me, you're going to get a blend of the, the jag core ligament, me, you're going to get the, you know, how coach Morvel ran a practice at, you know, University of Memphis, you're going to get a little bit of Mark Carney, you know, how he did things that, you know, and flipped that team last year at Kent State. Right. You know, there's, there's, you know, different parts that, you know, I pulled from each one of those guys. We haven't talked a bit about X's and O's, and we might not even get a chance to in the entirety of this conversation, just because the rest of this stuff is so interesting before you guys even, you know, get to the point of taking the field against Swanee on September 5th. I want to talk about the, the pressure of, and especially in the wake of news recently, and every year, this time of year, basically talking about small schools that are going to close down and, you know, be done at the end of a semester. And, and Bethany is a, Bethany is a small school. You just went from 38 guys to 91, and I assume you've got an incoming recruiting class. It's going to really help that as well. How have you, have you felt the pressure of having to provide enrollment for this school? Having a successful football program is a really good driver of enrollment across all sorts of schools at the division three level. It's been absolutely awesome. And, you know, there hasn't been a lot of pressure just because we've, we've worked so continuously in recruiting that, you know, I, I think there would be more of a level of pressure if we, you know, took a lax approach at recruiting, but our guys have been absolutely relentless, you know, from, you know, when guys are coming in January until