Snap Thoughts | UMass Coaching Staff

The new UMass coaching staff is installing its standards, sometimes with subtlety and sometimes without.

“You’re either coaching it or allowing it to happen.”

Well, the new UMass coaching staff is coaching everything and not allowing much of anything just to happen.

The eight hours or so we’ve had access inside The Bubble for spring practice this month has allowed some visibility into the establishment of the culture first-year head coach Joe Harasymiak is aiming to build.

Our viewing opportunities provide just a snippet of what is being built, but it’s quite insightful, especially at the very beginning of the process, when the changes aren’t as subtle as they will be down the road.

During the first week of spring practice, seeing coaches immediately yank a player off the field for a pre-snap penalty was commonplace.

By the end of the second week, it was rare for two reasons.

First, there have been less pre-snap penalties, which is the primary reason the UMass staff is employing the tactic.

But second - and perhaps just as important for the overall picture moving forward - the players no longer need to be told they’re out. They just run off on their own to do a round of push-ups while their replacement jumps in without any direction.

The first couple practices featured coaches shouting at players to sprint between drills during individual periods. The past couple practices included players readying themselves on their own like sprinters to get to the next drill during those same Indy periods.

The players are quickly learning what is expected of them and they’re beginning to deliver. I’ve yet to see a player respond with even the slightest hint of negativity, at least when the media was present.

These players are being coached HARD, too.

And Harasymiak found a way to prove nobody is above the team last week, singling out one of the most talented players on the entire roster and holding him accountable for a mistake.

A cursory view of practice would reveal a hectic atmosphere with plenty of shouting and stern direction from the coaches, which is to be expected with a new staff.

But if you were to get a little closer and pay a bit more attention, you’ll pick up on the building of individual relationships. Not every shout is actually made in disapproval. From a distance what may seem to be a critique is actually said in jest with coaches making strategic choices as to when to lighten the atmosphere and show some of their personalities.

Listen in even closer and you’ll be able to pick up the most minute technical details of a position; which hand to punch with, which foot to turn on, which eyeball to line up with the center of the opponent’s facemask.

We now find ourselves somewhere in between the initial jolt to grab the players’ attention and gameplanning for Temple. This is the space where you could argue football is taught on the most authentic level.

Where Week One featured plenty of energy from the coaches demanding the players match their intensity, Week Two saw some of those same coaches, bouncing and dancing to the latest hip-hop song blaring throughout The Bubble, seemingly in an effort to begin drawing out the kind of swagger the best play with.

Even Harasymiak gets into it at times, showing his new charges a different side of himself and making himself both relatable and vulnerable at the same time.

The staff’s youthful energy is obvious for anyone to see, but it goes a bit deeper than that. There’s an undeniable coolness - in the traditional sense - within the group.

More than that, though, these coaches go out of their way to show the players they’re in it with them all the way.

It’s one thing for 27-year-old running backs coach Jeremy Larkin to get on the ground and do post-practice push-ups and sit-ups with his players. It’s another thing entirely for Jim Reid, who turns 75 in December, to get down and do them as well.

And on top of that, nobody brings any added attention to it or points out how special that is. Instead, it’s the type of detail that everybody in the program will notice and come to realize, that’s just how things are done around here.

Will any of this equate to winning a game? Depends on how you look at it.

Will you be able to point back to Jim Reid’s post-practice push-ups in March as the reason the Minutemen beat Buffalo in October? Of course not.

But all put together, they’re the building blocks of a winning culture.

So, will it equate to winning a game? No.

But Harasymiak and his staff aren’t trying to win a game. They’re trying to win loads of games.

And from that lens, yes, it very much should equate to winning games.

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