‘It sure ain’t babysitting’: An inside look at Nick Saban’s

  • Chris Low, ESPN Elder WriterJun 14, 2023, 07:00 AM ET Close College football reporter Signed up with ESPN.com in 2007
  • Graduate of the University of Tennessee

TUSCALOOSA, ALA.– THE stifling heat is just beginning to reveal its teeth on a sun-splashed June morning when Nick Saban sees something he doesn’t like on the Alabama practice fields.

“Outdoors foot, outside foot. Pivot and run!” Saban yells as he bursts into the middle of a drill to passionately demonstrate how he desires it done.A couple of seconds later on, he grimaces and turns his ire on one of the assistant coaches.

“Hold it, hold it. We’re all ruined. We’re in nickel now,” he states, stepping forward with his arms restlessly crossed.Saban is not training Dallas Turner, Kool-Aid McKinstry or any person else on the Crimson Tide football team. However he may as well be.A voice over the speaker, nevertheless, makes clear this is a different type of exercise.”Brent Lewis, report to the 50-yard line. We have your helmet.

“Lewis is one of the more than 1,100 kids, ages 8 to 13, who have signed up for the famous coach’s youth football camp. Lots of are under 5 feet high, and the vast majority will not play Division I ball. But on this day, they all are getting the full Nick Saban experience– minus some vibrant words, possibly, and with a scattering of the innocence and turmoil that comes with a group of kids of those ages.”If these moms and dads are going to pay the money for their kids to come to camp, then we owe it to them to provide the complete Alabama experience, to teach them and coach them properly, “Saban says throughout his only break of the day, a 10-minute reprieve during a marathon picture shoot that included shaking hands and taking images with every camper.The campers come from as far away as Germany. They came from Canada and all over the United States, from California to Massachusetts. The youngest child of movie star Matthew McConaughey, 10-year-old Livingston, is on hand to learn from the coach who has actually won seven national championships and produced 49 NFL first-round draft choices. McConaughey, a big Texas fan, has actually remained in Birmingham filming a movie,”The Rivals of Amziah King. “The one-day, noncontact camp is intense, hectic and filled with meticulous guideline, as one might anticipate from a camp with Saban’s name attached to it.And Saban is anything however a spectator or a figurehead who makes a 10-minute appearance and lets others do the

grunt work. Throughout the early part of the camp, he hits the ground and does the stretching exercises with the kids, the exact same program Crimson Tide players do prior to practice. After having hip replacement surgery in 2019, Saban began doing the workouts with his own players to open practice.Nick Saban is barely simply a token at his annual youth football camp. The requirement stays the same as it provides for his @AlabamaFTBL players.

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