Marcus Freeman Has Three Clear Priorities For Notre Dame
Notre Dame has made it through fall camp and is ready to kick the 2023 season off against Navy on Saturday in Dublin, Ireland. Getting a team ready to maximize its potential is the perennial goal of every team during fall camp, and Irish head coach Marcus Freeman had three clear top priorities he wanted to accomplish with this year’s camp.
BUILDING DEPTH
"I wanted to build the depth of our team,” Freeman said on Monday. “I told you guys a couple weeks ago, there’s a lot of guys that we’re going to count on that do not have game experience. I’m pleased at the depth at certain positions that we were able to really get valuable reps in camp. We really forced the coaches to play some of those what we would call twos in one situations, and let’s see those guys develop and see what they can do when they’re playing against some of the best.”
There was a lot of offensive line mixing and matching throughout this year’s camp, with players like backup tackles Aamil Wagner and Tosh Baker as examples who saw first team reps at times. Other linemen like Pat Coogan and Rocco Spindler started camp lower on the depth chart, but ultimately earned starting nods at the two guard positions after showing their mettle with first-team opportunities.
BE PHYSICAL, STAY HEALTHY
Freeman and his staff prioritized health during camp as well, and to do so while building a physical football team. The good news is Notre Dame enters the season in relatively good health from an injury standpoint.
"The second thing was I wanted to really get us physically ready to play a game, but also keep us healthy,” Freeman explained. "It’s something that I looked at the injuries from last year in fall camp and I said we’ve got to find a better way to do this. I think we were down over half the concussions, and I know we decreased in every soft tissue ligament injury in all facets and any body part. So, we really decreased the injuries.
"I know the weather helped, but I think we were 79% down in dehydrations for fall camp,” Freeman continued. "Our team did a great job, just the sports performance team, the medical trainers, our coaches. (They) really did a great job of keeping the guys healthy and making sure we have everybody we need as we get ready to go to Dublin, Ireland.”
BUILDING LEADERSHIP
The final piece to Freeman’s three-pronged training camp priority list was increasing leadership within the ranks of the roster.
"I believe that’s what will be our edge is our leadership and we have a lot of leaders,” Freeman remarked. "We have a lot of guys that are in leadership positions but I think the team did a great job and our coaching staff did a great job of really promoting leadership, helping to build leadership, putting them in positions to...all of our seniors spoke to the team at some point about some of the lessons they’ve learned over their time here and really tried to just create an environment of leadership to really promote that amongst our program.”
JD Bertrand, Cam Hart, Joe Alt and Sam Hartman were all voted captains heading into the season. Freeman said a total of 10 different players received double digit votes when the team cast its ballots for who they thought should be the team’s leaders in 2023.
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