Northwestern University Athletics
Eastern Michigan Game Program Stories: The Wildcat Mission
9/14/2009 12:00:00 AM | Football
Sept. 14, 2009
By SKIP MYSLENSKI, NUsports.com Special Contributor
"Our number one goal as a staff is to be the best development staff in the country," Pat Fitzgerald is saying. "It's more than just the Xs and the Os. It's more than just what happens in the weight room or during the off-season running or on the field in the fall. It's about developing these young men into men and preparing them for life. It's about developing a structure for them and we have. But then we needed to educate them, for lack of a better term, on what we're trying to accomplish (as coaches). Then it took our players believing in it. They've grasped it and run with it and taken full advantage of the Northwestern extended family. I think that's something that sets us apart from most programs."
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The landscape is littered with glib coaches and the airways are filled with prattle as phony as the men spewing it. They are slicksters, hipsters, medicine men straight out of the Wild West and, when they talk of caring for the student in the student-athlete, they are no more sincere than a drunken sailor on the make. This is not the case with Pat Fitzgerald and, as evidence, we offer the 13 pages of a publication simply entitled "Northwestern Football Player Development Playbook."
There is not a single X nor is there an O on any of these pages. But, for the Wildcat program, it is as essential as any flight of fancy dreamed up by offensive coordinator Mick McCall or any withering blitz concocted by defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz. For here, in precise terms, in meticulous detail, a plan is laid out, a plan that gives every player a chance to be more than just a sad story once his career is over.
Those stories, like the glib coaches, also litter the landscape and attest to the dark side of celebrity, to the celebrity's detachment from reality, to the celebrity's inability to cope once he is confronted by that reality all others face every day. For too often, from that moment he first exhibited an extraordinary physical skill, he has been pampered and set apart, acclaimed and feted, showered with hosannas and encapsulated in what the late DePaul basketball coach Ray Meyer once called "a fantasy world, a bubble world."
This author, in a different lifetime, once examined that phenomena and during his research spoke with a former Notre Dame football co-captain named Mike Oriard, who was then an English professor at Oregon State. "Even in my relatively low position in the athletic hierarchy, I commanded a certain respect that wasn't normal," he noted. "Society in general lusts for heroes in the vacuum of an aristocracy and so it tends to create heroes. If you have double vision, you are to some degree detached from the celebrity image. But if you lose that double vision, you're really in trouble."
That, among its many, is one aim of this singular playbook. It works to assure that no 'Cat player loses that double vision, works to give all 'Cat players a chance to skirt that trouble encountered by so many. It can guarantee nothing, of course. Life is too messy and unpredictable for that. But, says a former Wildcat named Steve Kaiser ('81-'83), "Your life's been structured with school and football and, when it ends, it's like, 'Holy crap! What do I do now?' It's like you're pushed off a cliff. Instead of going off the cliff, I don't want to say it cushions their fall. But it gives them a path to pursue when they get out of school."
Kaiser, now, is the CEO of OrecX, a software company he founded. But, more saliently, he is also an alumni mentor, one of the 25 who were paired with a current player in January of his sophomore (academically) year. In this group are a senior financial analyst and a senior vice-president, an assistant U.S. attorney and an investment advisor, four company presidents, a corporate director and Patrick New, the regional sales manager for Reed Business Information.
New, to show just how this program works, is the mentor for sophomore (eligibility-wise) guard Doug Bartels, who is on a pre-med track with a biology/anthropology major. That is why, after they met, New introduced Bartels to Bill McCune, a family friend who is an anesthesiologist at Lake Forest Hospital. As a result, already, Bartels has scrubbed in for a half-dozen gastro-intestinal surgeries.
"We talk all the time about this Northwestern network. What I wanted to do was take the network and give it to our current players," explains Fitzgerald. "Not wait until they graduate. Not wait until they're seniors. But when they're young in their careers so they can cultivate that relationship and use it to their advantage in their undergraduate experience to prepare a resume, to get internships, the get practical work and to tap into that network.
"OK. I'm your mentor. Now I introduce you to other Northwestern alums who can help you prepare for life. It's like a mushroom. It keeps growing."
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Josh Rooks, the junior superback, is walking slowly toward the locker room. A psychology major, he is not yet certain where he is headed, which is why his mentor Kaiser said earlier this day that "My goal is to hook him up with a person or two a month. . .to help him build a perspective. So when he goes into a meeting that's in his wheelhouse, he knows how to ask the right questions, how to handle the interview, how to present himself."
"It definitely stretches you to do things that you may lay off, 'Hey, I'll take care of this after I graduate,'" Rooks is now saying about that. "But it's those kind of skills you need to start developing at this level. How to talk to different people in the business world and build relationships. It gives you an opportunity to reach out and network. It's been very helpful, especially for me.
"Psychology's one of those majors, 'What do I want to do from here? Do I want to go into psychology? Do I want to go into business and what can I do with that major?' It's been helpful to talk to other guys who studied the same things I have at Northwestern, and also played football, and see what they're doing, what are the possibilities. He's stretched me to find ways to find people myself that I can talk to in avenues I might be interested in after school."
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There is a Leadership Council. The 10 players on it are elected by their teammates and meet with Fitzgerald once a week for at least an hour. Two years ago, at their very first get together, Fitzgerald asked, "Are there any issues, any issues that I need to know that I don't know."
"Well, yeah," he was told. "There are three showers that aren't working in our locker room."
"How long have they been out?" wondered Fitzgerald.
"Oh. Probably a year."
"We would have fixed it immediately, if we knew. But they don't invite me in to take a shower with them," Fitzgerald now says with a laugh. "From that, which may seem mundane, to the Gatorade machine isn't working to can we wear white pants with our purple jerseys instead of all purple. It's that kind of stuff, typically. Or there might be an individual player struggling with this, struggling with that. They may alert me to something that's going on away from football. It's opened up lines of communication, which is exactly what we wanted."
There is a Big Brother Program. This matches a current player with a recruit, whom that player reaches out to the spring before he arrives on campus. Through the summer they talk on the phone and on the computer and so, when that recruit finally reaches Evanston, someone he knows is there to greet him. "It made it a lot easier for me to come in here," says freshman running back Arby Fields, whose Big Brother is corner Jordan Mabin.
"I'm coming from California, I don't know anybody. It was cool having someone here already when I got here to ask question that I didn't know the answers to. If I had any questions on how things worked, I'd just go to him and he'd answer all the questions for me."
Like?
"Where's the scale to weigh-in before and after practice."
There's a Police Ride Along Program. In it a freshman spends a four-hour shift patrolling campus with a University Police Officer, which is just what corner Demetrius Dugar was doing when some kid jumped onto the trunk of their idling car. "To him, it was like, 'Man, that's stupid people. What is he doing?'," says Cody Cejda, the coordinator of the player development program. "It gives them a chance to see what they don't want to be."
There are career development workshops open to all and media training sessions required for all. There are community outreach programs, which do everything from work in soup kitchens to work with the Special Olympics, and a program to prepare the blessed for the NFL, which provides help on everything from off-season training to hiring the right agent. Then, not insignificantly, there are the Wildcat Games.
It involves 10 teams, each headed by a member of the Leadership Council, and begins with a draft, which is key. Last off-season, while picking, quarterback Dan Persa selected two walk-ons who walked off, which killed his club's chances. But defensive end Corbin Bryant, the competition's most-valuable general manager, tapped receiver Mark Ison, who's renowned for his community service. That is one way points are earned in these Games, which are founded on competition. Weightlifting. Tournament wins. Team cumulative GPA. Those are other ways points are earned, but don't miss a class or have a messy locker, don't cheat on a test or let your GPA dip below 2.0. Those misdeeds cost you points.
"During the summer, we get to know each other," Bryant will say when asked about these Games. "Now, when we're out there, were able to trust each other when we're running plays."
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"The big thing I always wanted as a player was a plan to help me grow not only as an athlete, but also as a student and as a man," Pat Fitzgerald is finally saying. "So when we went 6-6, it was my second year as head coach and I felt we were missing something. We identified it as rock solid trust. We were missing that foundation that you need to really have each other's back. So we went out and researched a lot of different aspects of development, programs where we felt there were things we might want to emulate a little bit and make our own. That's how this all developed."
