The Tulane Green Wave football team finally completed their grueling offseason program designed to build culture and leadership.
The Tulane Green Wave football team officially completed their offseason program, the Gauntlet, on Friday, Feb. 27 – nearly a month after beginning the test. Now, of course, Mardi Gras here in New Orleans played a role in the timeline as well. But it took something like seven or eight attempts over the course of several weeks. In previous years, the team would try to compete daily until they bested the program. This year, new director of strength and conditioning, Colin Kenyon, switched things up and gave them rest days in between in order to give them a better chance at overcoming the buildup of fatigue.
There’s also, undeniably, the buildup of urgency, desire, and likely, frustration. Anyone who’s tried to beat a conditioning program after multiple attempts knows how primal that failure feels and how it grows each time. Thinking back to when completing those throughout soccer growing up, that was with a team and coach who had stayed relatively consistent through six or seven years. Contrast that with college football, and it’s not even the same ballpark. From coaching staffs to rosters, the turnover is astronomical in today’s age of the sport.
The Green Wave had over 50 new players on the roster last season. It’ll be curious to see how that number shakes out this year under new head coach Will Hall once spring practice kicks off on March 9. But now, that group of returners and new faces will have already gone through real, shared adversity that doesn’t exactly pop up in a spring practice session in the way the Gauntlet builds that standard and culture.
It seems easy enough: beat a series of conditioning drills in a certain allotted time per round with no mistakes – or at least, in the final station, and not too many penalties in the preceding rounds that all lead to a time penalty against the clock. They weren’t quite close to it back when I observed them on Feb. 6, which was their second attempt. Watching how grueling that is, it’s a considerable number of hours that they added on in the number of attempts they had to complete to beat it.
But as the attempts went on, so did the increased urgency that brings out real and natural leadership of those with the growing instinct to step up. And now, Tulane football has conquered a unifying task that will grow necessary chemistry and team-building ahead of spring camp.