Chip Kelly brought in a Navy SEAL to talk to the Eagles.
“Everything we do is high performance,” said tight end James Casey. “It’s awesome when coach Kelly brings in guys like that to talk to us about just kind of their mindset, what they think about, what their mentality is. They’re life and death with what they’re doing and we’re just out here playing a game. What he talks to us about is what their kind of mindset is and how he trains. It really resonates with us and it means a lot to have guys like that come out and talk to us.”
While the circumstances are very different, football players and soldiers do a lot of training.
Part of the message, said Casey, relates to the importance of the team’s practice tempo.
“You rise to the level of your training, he was kind of saying, was one thing that really stuck with me,” said Casey. “You don’t just go out there on game day and perform better, do anything you’ve never done before. You don’t come out there and perform better than you ever did in practice. You practice at a certain level and you expect yourself to practice higher than everyone in the league is going to practice so when it comes to game days, we can wear people down when we get into the fourth quarter because we’ve trained harder so we’re going to be able to perform better when it comes to the fourth quarter.”
Interesting stuff.
