SCOTT FROST’S PUSH
Frost’s push for speed challenges more than players
for UCF to play faster goes beyond the players: Coaches, support staff and even the school’s media relations team have been preparing to blast into the new era of Knights football.
Jovan DeWitt glanced down at his black FitBit bracelet and counted around 4,000 steps taken while coaching his linebackers one day during UCF football preseason camp. It wasn’t a UCFast kind of day. “I put on a lazy day today,” DeWitt said before breaking into a sly grin. “Usually it’s around six miles.”
Make that a six-mile jog for a few hours while simultaneously yelling and coaches can work themselves into quite the sweat steering the Knights’ new Oregonstyle system. It’s no wonder most of the staff observes a rigorous workout routine to help them better chase around 20-something-year-old Football Bowl Subdivision athletes.
Keeping up with UCF’s frenetic tempo these days is more than just a challenge for players. Coaches, support staff and even the school’s media relations team have been preparing to jet into the new era of the UCF football program.
The season officially kicks off against South Carolina State at 7 p.m. Saturday at Bright House Networks Stadium.
“We’ve got an active staff and a competitive staff and everybody works hard at practice,” new head coach Scott
Frost said. “[Offensive line coach] Greg Austin far and away gets the championship for the most sweat out of a coach during practice.”
Frost added with a hint of a chuckle, “We had a summer camp out here for high school kids and Coach G went into full body cramps afterward. When you’re getting that kind of effort out of your coaches, you gotta be excited about it.”
Everyone from the quarterbacks to the volunteers on the equipment team feels the burn during practices when the team averages about 119 plays.
In fact, equipment manager Thad Rivers said each of his volunteers loses about one to two pounds during each two-hour practice.
“Generally, I have about 10 to 12 guys. Now, I have 15 [volunteers] and need three more,” Rivers said. “For all the things we do, guys are moving from one drill to another with a coach and moving to different parts of the field and we need to have that set up because as soon as the team gets over there, it’s down, set hike, let’s go play ball.”
Plays are swarming by so fast and Frost wants the offense to snap the ball so quickly that sports information director Brian Ormiston said he’s planning to add an additional statistician to his game-day operations to help keep track of the action.
Longtime UCF broadcaster Marc Daniels said he watched about 30 hours of Oregon tapes to get a stronger feel for system tendencies. He said there’s a running joke among Oregon broadcasters to nix watching the stat monitor because it’s usually five to six plays behind the actual game.
Daniels usually jots down his own live stats during games, but he said he’s had to come up with a new coding system to prepare for the speed.
“Watching Oregon, when their offense was on, it moves. You don’t realize how fast they do run plays. Sometimes you’re just trying to, from a standpoint of calling a game, you want to see who we have in on offense or what the defense does and if they’re making changes, but by the time you find [the changes] the snap is made and things domino effect from there,” Daniels said. “So it takes an adjustment for us. I’m sure we’ll get comfortable as the season gets along, but I imagine the first couple of games it’ll be a little bit of an adjust on the fly.”
Outside of players, coaches have to make the most physical adjustments to the new system.
During the spring, several of the coaches and support staff marked out a few days a week to play pick-up basketball. Several coaches ran stadium steps after practice. The oldest coach on staff, quarterbacks coach Mario Verduzco, is known for jogging at least four miles every day – in khaki shorts.
This summer, running backs coach Ryan Held convinced several folks on staff to start playing beach volleyball on UCF’s sand court.
Held said he really valued the importance of staying in shape as a head coach during his last job at Northeast Oklahoma A&M. He said his head used to hurt at the end of the day and he’d be physically spent from yelling and running after athletes for two hours in the hot sun.
“You look at how college football is changing to the extent of how fast people are playing, so if you’re not firing on a higher cylinder and don’t have a faster twitch yourself, then you won’t be able to keep up,” Held said. “Your energy level isn’t up there and it’s hard to get your guys to play at that level.”
And players can’t help but notice their linebackers coach has completed more than 1,000 225-pound bench presses since June. Or that their head coach can still zip a football down the field and their offensive coordinator Troy Walters, a former Biltnekoff winner, can still lace up his cleats and run routes. Or that Held, also the team’s official huddle hype man, is known to run gassers after a long practice.
“When I see that, I’m like, I have to grind harder,” UCF senior linebacker Errol Clarke said. “Why are they working harder than me? [I’ve] got to work harder than them. It’s like they try to outdo me when I need to outdo them.”