Brian Kelly Impressed With Notre Dame’s Productivity Amid COVID-19 Shutdown
Beyond the loss of 14 spring practices and workouts, Brian Kelly felt his players were deprived in another area of their student-athlete life: The academic experience.
Just as COVID-19 forced the team to disband and necessitate remote workouts and meetings until cleared to return, it shoved all their classes and campus life to exclusively electronic. While supporting the decision, Kelly felt bad a major part of the reason they chose Notre Dame went away, along with their chance to develop as football players.
“This is uncharted territory,” Kelly said Tuesday on The Fight, Notre Dame’s fundraiser for COVID-19 relief efforts. “They didn’t come to Notre Dame to be online students. They came to be directly involved on a day-to-day basis. Everybody had to improvise and adapt.”
Two months later, with the semester over, he’s pleased with the players’ seamless pivot and ability to focus amid an on-the-fly transition. They had help — Kelly previously said each assistant was assigned to about 10 players to monitor from an academic standpoint.
“A lot of the credit goes to them, but our academic support staff was outstanding, led by Adam Sargent,” Kelly said. “Our coaches, they had to put on a different hat. It wasn’t football. It was about academics and supporting our students-athletes. We had constant communication.”
Notre Dame’s eight early enrollee freshman started classes in January, hoping for less of an adjustment to college life when the season started and the benefit of two extra months with director of football performance Matt Balis and 15 spring practices. Instead, they finished their semester online and practiced once. The start of summer workouts and training camp is still uncertain, meaning the rest of the freshman might face a truncated lead-in to the season compared to normal.
Kelly, though, doesn’t see it as creating a lost season for the 2020 class or putting a damper on a freshman’s ceiling.
“I don’t know if there is a particular one, other than I will say this: A true freshman will emerge and play significant time on both sides of the ball,” Kelly said. “We saw that last year with Kyle Hamilton and the impact he made as a Freshman All-American. You’re going to see that this year in 2020.”
Once again, Kelly echoed his old stance that the players need some kind of summer workout session with Balis to get ready for the season. Normally, it starts in June. It can be abbreviated, but still must be six to eight weeks of training before the first game and at least a few weeks before the first training camp practice. Getting clearance to do so is a decision that will be made above Kelly.
“We’re looking at early July to get back and get student-athletes in a position where physically from a cardiovascular and muscular standpoint — soft tissue — we’re not having injuries there,” Kelly said.
In the meantime, Notre Dame will continue Zoom meetings by position group, SWAT, team-wide and among staff. So far, Kelly said it hasn’t created a drain on productivity.
“Not being in the office, you concern yourself with not being able to be as efficient,” Kelly said. “We’ve been able to be extremely efficient though the use of a Zoom call or FaceTime. … You can be effective from distance as long as you’re communicating effectively.”
Recruiting has maintained its optimal mania despite the transition to Zoom, a moratorium on visits and loss of the spring evaluation period. In four-star cornerback Philip Riley and three-star defensive end Jason Onye, Notre Dame has picked up two commitments from players who felt comfortable giving their pledge without visiting campus. North Carolina State graduate transfer cornerback Nick McCloud also committed without a visit as a recruit.
“We have to bring our campus to student-athletes we’re recruiting, and we’ve found ways to do that,” Kelly said. “It forces you to think outside the box a little bit.”
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