By Justin Feil, Assistant Sports Editor
The countdown is on for the Princeton University football team.
Coaches and players alike can sit and watch all sorts of coverage of the start of pre-season football practices everywhere seemingly but the Ivy League. The Tigers won’t report until next Tuesday and start practicing until Aug. 27. It’s nearly two full weeks away.
“At least in the summer, we have about a week or 10 days filled with camps, whether it’s little kids or high school kids,” said PU head coach Bob Surace. “That’s what we love to do — be on the field coaching.
“I think I drive my family nuts. I think my wife can’t wait for me to go to training camp. I do my best. We have this extra time and we have to utilize it first and focus and not recreate everything we’ve done the last eight months. We’ve worked hard the last eight months.”
Surace expects that his players are putting in their final preparation to get ready for the start of preseason, though this time away from the field is spent on a different side of the team aspect. It’s a sort of different team bonding that can happen.
“It’s rare when I don’t run into five or six guys who are stopping by the office and trying to do things,” Surace said. “I’m not going to bug them too much. I don’t ask them, ‘How much did you bench today?’
“It’s a great time we can spend with them. We’re going to get them 24 hours a day for two weeks to the point where they’re not going to want to see us. We can talk about life now.”
The coaches see players, but they aren’t permitted to work them out. There have been upwards of 70 players on campus for stretches of the summer to work out on their own.
“There will be times when I come in the office and the quarterbacks will be in the quarterbacks room watching film,” Surace said. “I’ll ask how are things going and how are your jobs going? It’s not uncommon to have our rooms filled in the morning. You know they’re working and it’s important to them. The proof will be in how good of shape they’re in when they report to practice.”
Surace sees many of his players as they pass by the office to do film study and to head to workouts. He and the coaches haven’t been able to supervise workouts since May 4.
“May 4 they were on their own,” Surace said. “We don’t have anything we do with them on the field until Aug. 27. That’s almost four months. Jason Gallucci gets to be the football coach for four months on his own with his staff.
“When I interviewed, (Cincinnati Bengals head coach) Marvin Lewis was adamant: your strength coach better be great. I was fortunate. Jason came from Penn State. Our strength coach with the Bengals was from Penn State and he was able to do the background and I could check that off.”
Surace and his coaches are able to work with their players after the season ends up until May. They try to take that time to establish the way that players have to push themselves in order for the program to improve.
“We get off the road recruiting in January,” Surace said. “We’re with them when they lift four days a week and then they run on Friday. For Monday-Friday for an hour, we could spend that time a lot of ways, and it’s about developing our players and seeing how hard they work in the weight room. We do all sorts of things to reward them. We have things in the locker room to show them the guys that are the most successful.”
But once the end of the spring semester gets close, the players work out only with Gallucci and his co-workers. It puts the responsibility on the players to develop themselves.
“They’re given a program,” Surace said. “The ones on campus, and we’ve had 75-85 guys roll through Princeton for a couple weeks, they’re allowed to work out with the strength coach and then they throw two or three times a week on their own.
“Hopefully we’ve trained them well enough in the spring that they’re doing a great job with that. We’ve really had some really good veteran leaders in the last couple years. You trust those guys are building the right habits so those guys are ready for camp.”
The process has evolved plenty over the decades since Surace played. There are more resources for players to develop and good opportunities.
“When I played here in the dinosaur age, in the late ‘80s, that was unheard of to stay on campus (for the summer),” Surace said. “There was no reason to be on campus. There was no strength coach. Typically you had your gym at home, you’d try to buddy up with someone and then you come back.
“Now the training is so high tech. We have strength coaches, we have nutritionists, all these people there to help them. We’re fortunate at Princeton that so many guys are able to do internships around here.”
And Princeton’s football coaches have to trust the person in charge of overseeing the player workouts on campus. Gallucci has helped to put the Tigers into position to be a contender. Surace’s program comes off a 5-5 season, 4-3 in the Ivy League that put them fourth overall — just where they were selected for 2015 in the preseason media poll that was released on Tuesday.
“We have 14 guys returning that have made All-Ivy,” Surace said. “There are some experienced guys. The one area in the league that everybody has is a quarterback that started. Whether it’s a guy that did it for three years like Dalyn Williams at Dartmouth or guys who did it for a few games, we’re the only team without a guy who’s taken snaps as a starter.
“I thought at times in the spring we were exceptional and at times we have to limit the error. That comes with experience and reps and hopefully by the time we play Lafayette we’ve gotten the majority of those errors out of the way.”
By the time the Ivy season starts, Surace is hopeful that his quarterbacks have had enough reps to make all the right plays.
“The great thing about Quinn Epperly was it was rare for him to make a split second decision incorrectly,” Surace said. “And by the time Connor Michelson was a senior he didn’t make many errors. His interception ratio went way, way down with all those reps. The guys we have coming back are equally talented and they’re great kids and studious and work hard but they haven’t had live reps. It’s up to us as coaches and me as head coach to put them in situations where they make good decisions all the time.”
Surace hinted that he could again use a multi-quarterback system. Leading quarterback contenders for the Tigers are Chad Kanoff, who was the MVP of the spring game, and Kedric Bostic and John Lovett. Captains this year are receiver Seth DeValve and linebacker Matt Arends. Arends has played safety in the past, but looked comfortable in the spring in a new spot while former cornerback Khamal Brown moved to his safety spot.
“I know Matt Arends is an All-League safety but he’s 225 and he needs to move closer to the ball now,” Surace said. “He did a great job.”
The Princeton coaches think about position moves as soon as the season ends, but they don’t ask the players to worry about a move until their spring practices. The 12 spring practices give them repetitions at a new spot – or in the cases of the quarterbacks, a chance to impress to fill a void.
“I’ll have four or five names written down that we’ll consider switching positions,” Surace said. “I’ll have meetings with them in February. Then we get them ready for spring practice.”
The spring gives way to more workouts with the coaches, and then into the summer and the plan agreed upon by the coaches and Gallucci. It helps the players return bigger, faster and stronger and ready to tackle the challenges of the next season. It’s just that Ivy League players and coaches have to wait a little longer to see the fruit of their labor because of the later start of the preseason.
“At some point we connect with all our guys,” Surace said. “They’re itching to go.”
