East Lansing — Team bonding does have its limits, apparently.
And it only took one night living in the dorms together for Pat Fitzgerald’s players to realize that this week, as a new era of Michigan State football kicked off with an old-school feel to preseason camp.
There are logistical reasons for housing the entire team in one of the campus dormitories, as Fitzgerald has chosen to do, harkening back to his own playing days in the Big Ten. Case Hall is right across the street from the Skandalaris Football Center, in fact. So there’s no excuses for being late. And with a daily schedule that starts with a team breakfast at 6:45 a.m., quarterback Alessio Milivojevic noted, “it actually saves guys a few minutes of sleep.”
But for a new head coach who is in a hurry to instill a culture — and build a winner — with a roster that features some 50 new faces with all the transfers and incoming freshmen, there’s a more holistic rationale behind this throwback idea.
“You gotta get a little uncomfortable,” Fitzgerald explained Thursday, shortly after the Spartans wrapped up their first official camp practice. “But it’s just to bring the guys together, reinforce brotherhood, and get them to know their teammates better.”
Just how well that works, time will tell. But the early returns are positive, as players spend their down time together talking, laughing, playing cards, you name it. There are plans for movie nights, karaoke and more.
“I think it’s great, camaraderie-wise,” Milivojevic said. “It’s awesome. There’s a lot of new guys on the team. We’ve done a great job throughout the year of just getting to know each other. But this fall camp in the dorms can really help us solidify relationships.”
That said, going without some of the luxuries a major-college football player enjoys in this moneyed NIL age — whether it’s their car keys or those “palatial” accomodations at 1855 Place “that are nicer than any apartment I had as a post-graduate,” Fitzgerald joked — is a bit of shock to the system. Safety Nikai Martinez, a fifth-year senior, admitted this is his first time living in a dorm, “but if he’s rocking, I’m rolling.”
To that end, Fitzgerald even had T-shirts made up for everyone with a camping motif — “It’s like we’re in the trees,” he said — and the 51-year-old head coach smiled as he recounted some of the anxious uncertainty he sensed in the days leading up to Wednesday’s dorm check-in.
“Some of the guys texted me, ‘What should I pack?’” he said. “I told ‘em, ‘Like vacation … for football.’ So, yeah, that alone told me this is the reason why to do it? Like, they’ve just been used to so many creature comforts. And there’s nothing comfortable about football. There’s nothing easy about football.
“Same thing with relationships. You’ve got to pour into each other. You’ve got to have the time on task, and these guys have done a great job all offseason. But Day 1 of the fourth quarter of our preparation is already done, so we’re running out of time with this team. And we’re just trying to reinforce the kind of mindset that we want.”
As most of us remember from our college days, dorm life does require some sacrifice. It also requires the kind of coordination that only comes with co-habitation, which was a Day 1 discovery for Milivojevic and his roommate, linebacker Brady Pretzlaff, a fellow redshirt sophomore. They’re sharing a four-person suite with pair of true freshmen in safety Jonathan Granby and cornerback Truth Umenyiora.
“And the one thing about the bathroom is that you can’t lock the door,” Milivojevic said, laughing. “So we kind of made a rule where you have to knock before you walk in, just in case someone’s using it.”
Rules are important, no doubt. And not that they hadn’t figured it out already — having gone through winter conditioning, spring practice and summer workouts with Fitzgerald and his high-energy, “hair-on-fire” staff — but the first day of camp provided a few more reminders that things are decidedly different here for the Spartans.
As you’d expect, Thursday’s initial practice was littered with execution errors as players began to shake off the rust on the field. “Nothing quite prepares you for football like football,” was how Fitzgerald put it.
But aside from the obvious questions about X’s and O’s — with new schemes, a new staff and an overhauled roster — there’s also a point being made to the players about minding their P’s and Q’s, too.
For example, one area where they failed to execute Thursday was the scheduled water break in the middle of practice. “Unorganized” and “disheveled” were the words Fitzgerald used to describe it.
“It may sound silly, but we weren’t very good at it,” he said, “so we’ll be better at it tomorrow.”
Another breakdown came at the end of practice.
“I walked by a garbage can, and maybe it was just pure dumb luck on my end, but I picked up two Gatorade bottles and some (snack) wrappers,” Fitzgerald said. “And I took a piece of their ass afterwards, because the standard is, ‘Everywhere we go, we’re going to leave it better than we found it.’”
That message was received, loud and clear, Milivojevic said: “It’s unacceptable. It’s something the team should be doing. Something I should be doing as a leader. I should be picking that up instead of Coach. He should never have to pick something up off the field.”
Same goes for the towels hanging out of the back of players’ waistbands, apparently.
“We shouldn’t have our tails hanging out of our shirts, streaming down to the ground,” Fitzgerald said, his voice rising. “It’s not what we do. I don’t really give a s— if they do that at other places. That’s not what we’re going to do.”
There’s a point to making those little things a big deal, of course. And it goes back to the old axiom that Fitzgerald, a former All-American linebacker at Northwestern, says he learned early in a coaching career that began nearly 30 years ago: “You either coach it or you allow it to happen, right?”
“So we’re just building a standard of expectation, because that’s got to be the bedrock we build this thing on, OK?” he added. “It’s not going to be built on sand. And to do something special, we’ve got to get ourselves up to a championship standard — and that’s everybody that touches the Spartan football program.”
And at least for now, anyway, it’s everybody together under one roof.
john.niyo@detroitnews.com
@JohnNiyo
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Niyo: Dorms part of new norms at Michigan State under Pat Fitzgerald
Reporting by John Niyo, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By John Niyo, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
