On Saturday, Alabama head football coach Nick Saban joined Eli Gold on the Alabama Athletics Spring Update Show. Saban shared how throughout the coronavirus, he and the other coaches have had to adapt to doing things differently, given the circumstances. One of the ways Saban has continued to recruit and make sure his players and doing what they should be doing? Zoom.
When Gold asked Saban about his new “normal” day schedule, Saban’s answer may come as a little surprise to some:
“We’ve been staying busy. I’m a Level 1 employee. I think there’s about three of those in whole Mal Moore building, so there’s about three of us that actually come in here. But I come in every day until noon, and we have a Zoom at 7:30 in the morning with the staff and organize what we’re going to do for that day, and most of it has been threefold. A, we work on next year’s opponents. B, we have an hour-long session Monday-Thursday with our players, so we organize what we’re going to do in that. And then we’re constantly working on recruiting evaluations and organization of who’s going to talk to what recruits, and I do a lot of Zoom video conferences with recruits and their families, mostly late in the afternoon and early evenings. It stays pretty busy through the week. On the weekends, of course, we don’t have anything, so we’ve been staying at home and trying to stay safe. But the normal day is busy, which I still enjoy, and you just have staff meetings on Zoom. It’s not with everybody sitting in the room.”
Saban has not let the coronavirus stop him from recruiting, and that’s one reason why Saban is who he is, and why he keeps winning. He has learned to adapt and change things when they have to change.
But he’s not just using Zoom to recruit and for staff meetings, it’s also how he’s communicating with the players on his team now.
And for those who might not know, Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems.
The players have been really, really good. Their attention has been good. We always check on their well-being, their families’ well-being, and then we’re also very cognizant of academics, have a good plan for every player and make sure they do their stuff in a timely fashion. And then we probably spend about 55 minutes of that on organized install, and we’ve probably been doing this now for 10 or 12 days and we’re probably somewhere between Day 4 and Day 5 of what we’d do in spring practice because we take everything really, really slow, show a lot of examples, show a lot of teaching progression examples from practice and things like that. It’s really been good.
We actually had a team meeting on Zoom yesterday with me. I sit in a different meeting every day so I can see the different players at every position because you don’t see them every day. I think they look forward to it, I think it keeps them connected and I think it gives them something to look forward to. We try to emphasize with the players that routine is really important in something like this. When are you doing your schoolwork? When are you working out? When are you having your 2 o’clock Zoom position meeting? And they’ve been good. It’s worked out as well as can be expected.”
Although these aren’t ideal situations, Saban is doing whatever he can to make sure his team is ready to go this fall.
Earlier this week, Trump mentioned Alabama football in a press conference when asked if sports would happen this year. “Our normal is if you have 100,00 people in an Alabama football game or 110,000 to be specific,” Trump said. “Normal” is not going to be a game where you have 50,000. We want 110,00 people there. We want every seat occupied. Normal is not going to be a game where we have 50,000” people.”
That shout out came after President Trump had a conference call with major league sports commissioners a little over a week ago, and according to ESPN, “President Donald Trump said he believes the NFL season should start on time in September.”
Although the future is full of uncertainty, this news at least brings a dose of hope as sports fans all over the world have been missing watching their favorite sports.
But we can rest assured, no matter what happens in the future, Nick Saban will find a way to adjust to keep his team on top.
The NFL Draft is still scheduled to take place from April 23-25th, although it will be a virtual draft.