University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points: Summer Heat
June 26, 2024 | Football
By Lee Pace
On Monday, the dead period hit. All quiet now on the recruiting front. Mack Brown and his staff can squeeze in a week of vacation, perhaps a long weekend or two leading up to the July 22 all-hands-on-deck landmark for the launch of training camp and the 2024 college football season.
What used to be a relatively casual month of June has turned into a cauldron of camps and recruiting weekends (both official and unofficial visits)—to say nothing of managing a squad of players through an important off-season conditioning and leadership-development regimen.
"People think our busy time is the season," Mack Brown says. "It's really not. They are long days, but we're in a routine during the season and it's all pretty structured. December and June are the craziest months on the calendar now."
In June, Brown and his staff hosted one camp for kickers, punters and snappers and another for quarterbacks. Later, they ran concurrent events for 7-on-7 teams from around the southeast and another for linemen on both sides of the ball. The schedule built up to Sunday's climatic Showtime Camp, the staff's annual football-apalooza built around competition and camaraderie for the region's elite high school prospects.
"The early signing day has changed everything," Brown says of the NCAA adjustment of the recruiting calendar beginning in 2017 to allow high school prospects to sign in December rather than waiting until the traditional first Wednesday in February. "Before, there was not nearly as much recruiting in April, May and June. You had official visits in December and January and signed in February. Now it's moved up.
"Some players are committing early now because of the transfer portal. They want to secure their scholarship. They worry that if they wait, come mid-season a school might decide they need immediate help at that position and look to find someone in the portal who can help right away rather than develop someone out of high school."
Meanwhile, summer is a time for players to lay the framework for the fall. As the Tar Heels have heard from C.L. "Shep" Shepherd, a former NFL lineman who talks and writes of his experiences growing up from poverty (he was one of 16 children growing up in Florida who remembers going days without food): "You don't have a winning season once the season starts. If you want to accomplish something significant this season, something meaningful this season, you've got to pay the price right now."
Toward that end, the Tar Heels have worked out twice a day on most weekdays, breaking routines up into weight room in one session and running and conditioning the second.
"Attack is the word I like to use in the summer," says strength and conditioning coach Brian Hess. "We want to attack every day, attack every session, not waste one session or one minute of time. If we have an off day, someone else is working. When camp opens, I want every player to look back and say, 'It was a long, hard summer, but we attacked every day, we showed up every day."
Renowned for his ability to bring uber-focus, effort and productivity to conditioning sessions dating to his days at Cleveland High is Omarion Hampton, who returns for his junior season after making first-team All-ACC and first-team All-America on the Walter Camp team in 2023. Hampton rushed for 1,504 yards and 15 touchdowns as a sophomore and was healthy throughout, a testament to his physical strength and conditioning.
"He has an incredible foundation of strength," Hess says. "He came in as a 600-pound-plus squatter and has gotten better. He attacks everything in front of him. He's improved his vision, and his explosiveness is off the charts. He had a great season last fall. I think this year will be even more special."
Hampton feels "the sky's the limit" for the 2024 Tar Heels, given in part the fact that a team "can re-invent itself every year in the portal." Naturally soft-spoken and preferring to let his actions do his talking, Hampton has learned to become more vocal and knows that great teams are led from within.
"I have to step up, I have to step out of my comfort zone and become one of leaders of this team," he says. "The summer is a big opportunity to get better. We have more free time to get better at our craft. Everyone can get better in the film room. We can put the right things in our body. We can improve the little things. For me, it's catching the ball, reading defenses better, blocking better."
Head nutritionist Amber Rinestine-Ressa is in charge of what the players put in their bodies. Green lights: Lots of water and smoothies. Red lights: fried foods (the Tar Heels are limited to "Wing Wednesdays" on the fried front along with the occasional tater tot). Each player has a nutrition plan catered to his particular needs. An offensive lineman who needs to gain weight, for example, might consume 8,000 calories a day.
"We have individual meetings to start the summer and talk about goals," she says. "Where do we want their bodies to go in three months and what are the steps to get there? We have three or four goals with each player, we write them down and hold them to that. Their position coaches get those goals and together we evaluate them throughout the summer."
Among the responsibilities of Kevin Donnalley, director of the Koman Game Plan for Success, is to coordinate the myriads of speakers and leadership consultants that come through Chapel Hill throughout the year, particularly in the summer months.
Johnathan Robertson, a Tar Heel running back in early 1990s who earned a law degree from Harvard and has gone on to a successful career in finance, venture capital and commercial real estate, has delivered presentations on how the giants of the business world have gotten to the top with skills that apply to athletics and a football team.
Ex-Marine Joe McNamara uses his experience in more than 100 combat deployments in Afghanistan and in mentoring leaders at Marine Corps boot camps to teach business groups and sports teams how to develop leadership and a championship culture. His consultancy, Impact, has had an ongoing relationship with the Tar Heels.
Damon West is a former quarterback at North Texas State who overcame drug addiction and served seven years of what was originally a life sentence to become a sought-after speaker. With Jon Gordon he co-authored The Coffee Bean, a book espousing a transformational lesson who how individuals can take any environment they find themselves in and work it to their advantage. He spoke to the Tar Heels four years ago and is scheduled to come to Chapel Hill again this year.
"It's good for our players to hear different voices, to see different perspectives," says Donnalley, a former Tar Heel offensive lineman who played a dozen years in the NFL. "The theme running through all of these speakers is for the guys to take responsibility and ownership for your own journey. If it's going to be, it's up to you. It's a big transition from high school to college. They were so gifted, many of them never learned to do the extra. They took success for granted. College ball is a different story, and we're trying to give them all the resources so they can be successful."
Shepherd's story of his mother working at a gas station by day and Waffle House at night, of his father being in prison, of him hating summer recess from school because he didn't get that free lunch, of not getting a Christmas present until he was nine years old is particularly moving. He told the Tar Heels of thinking of taking his own life at age 14 but a moment of divine intervention changed his life.
"In the flick of a switch, I changed my mind, and it changed my life," he said. "I decided I wouldn't give up and I wouldn't give in. I am here to tell you that a man is not defeated until he blames someone else. I am telling you that you are the result of the lump sum of decisions you have made up to this point and you always will be."
One of Shepherd's dictums is that successful people nearly always have to shed their lives of something before moving on and told the story of a man who was stranded in the Arizona desert, his arm was caught amid a boulder avalanche, and he had to cut his arm off to find his way back to civilization. That is a metaphor for a football player cutting a posse of hangers-on, cutting the habit of watching too many video games or being addicted to their phone, cutting the tendency to ease off when fatigue and pain take over. He first addressed the Tar Heels in the spring of 2023 and his words affected everyone, Brown included.
"Shep talked about everyone needing to lose something," Brown said in August 2023 when Shepherd was invited back. "I lost my 43 pounds because I needed it. I needed to get rid of it, for you all, for me, for my health, for everything. All of us have stuff we need to get rid of."
Shepherd will return again before the season opens and his message will play into the theme of the Tar Heels as a collective looking deep into themselves and figuring out how to turn strong starts in 2022 and '23 into strong finishes through November, an ACC championship game and a bowl game.
"We were so far down when we got here, you have to learn to win," Brown says. "You do something good, and you have a setback. You dust yourself off, do something a little better and have another setback. The fact we won a Coastal Division championship but didn't finish right shows what we can do. The fact we were 6-0 and tenth in the country but didn't finish right again shows how high we can go.
"Everything we did this spring and are doing this summer is challenging everyone—players, staff, coaches, me included—figure out why. Everybody is taking responsibility for not finishing well. We have to figure it out and do better."
There are plenty of resources at the Tar Heels' disposal this summer to try and solve the riddle.
Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace (Carolina '79) has been writing about Tar Heel football under the "Extra Points" banner since 1990 and reporting from the sidelines on radio broadcasts since 2004. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.
On Monday, the dead period hit. All quiet now on the recruiting front. Mack Brown and his staff can squeeze in a week of vacation, perhaps a long weekend or two leading up to the July 22 all-hands-on-deck landmark for the launch of training camp and the 2024 college football season.
What used to be a relatively casual month of June has turned into a cauldron of camps and recruiting weekends (both official and unofficial visits)—to say nothing of managing a squad of players through an important off-season conditioning and leadership-development regimen.
"People think our busy time is the season," Mack Brown says. "It's really not. They are long days, but we're in a routine during the season and it's all pretty structured. December and June are the craziest months on the calendar now."
In June, Brown and his staff hosted one camp for kickers, punters and snappers and another for quarterbacks. Later, they ran concurrent events for 7-on-7 teams from around the southeast and another for linemen on both sides of the ball. The schedule built up to Sunday's climatic Showtime Camp, the staff's annual football-apalooza built around competition and camaraderie for the region's elite high school prospects.
"The early signing day has changed everything," Brown says of the NCAA adjustment of the recruiting calendar beginning in 2017 to allow high school prospects to sign in December rather than waiting until the traditional first Wednesday in February. "Before, there was not nearly as much recruiting in April, May and June. You had official visits in December and January and signed in February. Now it's moved up.
"Some players are committing early now because of the transfer portal. They want to secure their scholarship. They worry that if they wait, come mid-season a school might decide they need immediate help at that position and look to find someone in the portal who can help right away rather than develop someone out of high school."
Meanwhile, summer is a time for players to lay the framework for the fall. As the Tar Heels have heard from C.L. "Shep" Shepherd, a former NFL lineman who talks and writes of his experiences growing up from poverty (he was one of 16 children growing up in Florida who remembers going days without food): "You don't have a winning season once the season starts. If you want to accomplish something significant this season, something meaningful this season, you've got to pay the price right now."
Toward that end, the Tar Heels have worked out twice a day on most weekdays, breaking routines up into weight room in one session and running and conditioning the second.
"Attack is the word I like to use in the summer," says strength and conditioning coach Brian Hess. "We want to attack every day, attack every session, not waste one session or one minute of time. If we have an off day, someone else is working. When camp opens, I want every player to look back and say, 'It was a long, hard summer, but we attacked every day, we showed up every day."
Renowned for his ability to bring uber-focus, effort and productivity to conditioning sessions dating to his days at Cleveland High is Omarion Hampton, who returns for his junior season after making first-team All-ACC and first-team All-America on the Walter Camp team in 2023. Hampton rushed for 1,504 yards and 15 touchdowns as a sophomore and was healthy throughout, a testament to his physical strength and conditioning.
"He has an incredible foundation of strength," Hess says. "He came in as a 600-pound-plus squatter and has gotten better. He attacks everything in front of him. He's improved his vision, and his explosiveness is off the charts. He had a great season last fall. I think this year will be even more special."
Hampton feels "the sky's the limit" for the 2024 Tar Heels, given in part the fact that a team "can re-invent itself every year in the portal." Naturally soft-spoken and preferring to let his actions do his talking, Hampton has learned to become more vocal and knows that great teams are led from within.
"I have to step up, I have to step out of my comfort zone and become one of leaders of this team," he says. "The summer is a big opportunity to get better. We have more free time to get better at our craft. Everyone can get better in the film room. We can put the right things in our body. We can improve the little things. For me, it's catching the ball, reading defenses better, blocking better."
Head nutritionist Amber Rinestine-Ressa is in charge of what the players put in their bodies. Green lights: Lots of water and smoothies. Red lights: fried foods (the Tar Heels are limited to "Wing Wednesdays" on the fried front along with the occasional tater tot). Each player has a nutrition plan catered to his particular needs. An offensive lineman who needs to gain weight, for example, might consume 8,000 calories a day.
"We have individual meetings to start the summer and talk about goals," she says. "Where do we want their bodies to go in three months and what are the steps to get there? We have three or four goals with each player, we write them down and hold them to that. Their position coaches get those goals and together we evaluate them throughout the summer."
Among the responsibilities of Kevin Donnalley, director of the Koman Game Plan for Success, is to coordinate the myriads of speakers and leadership consultants that come through Chapel Hill throughout the year, particularly in the summer months.
Johnathan Robertson, a Tar Heel running back in early 1990s who earned a law degree from Harvard and has gone on to a successful career in finance, venture capital and commercial real estate, has delivered presentations on how the giants of the business world have gotten to the top with skills that apply to athletics and a football team.
Ex-Marine Joe McNamara uses his experience in more than 100 combat deployments in Afghanistan and in mentoring leaders at Marine Corps boot camps to teach business groups and sports teams how to develop leadership and a championship culture. His consultancy, Impact, has had an ongoing relationship with the Tar Heels.
Damon West is a former quarterback at North Texas State who overcame drug addiction and served seven years of what was originally a life sentence to become a sought-after speaker. With Jon Gordon he co-authored The Coffee Bean, a book espousing a transformational lesson who how individuals can take any environment they find themselves in and work it to their advantage. He spoke to the Tar Heels four years ago and is scheduled to come to Chapel Hill again this year.
"It's good for our players to hear different voices, to see different perspectives," says Donnalley, a former Tar Heel offensive lineman who played a dozen years in the NFL. "The theme running through all of these speakers is for the guys to take responsibility and ownership for your own journey. If it's going to be, it's up to you. It's a big transition from high school to college. They were so gifted, many of them never learned to do the extra. They took success for granted. College ball is a different story, and we're trying to give them all the resources so they can be successful."
Shepherd's story of his mother working at a gas station by day and Waffle House at night, of his father being in prison, of him hating summer recess from school because he didn't get that free lunch, of not getting a Christmas present until he was nine years old is particularly moving. He told the Tar Heels of thinking of taking his own life at age 14 but a moment of divine intervention changed his life.
"In the flick of a switch, I changed my mind, and it changed my life," he said. "I decided I wouldn't give up and I wouldn't give in. I am here to tell you that a man is not defeated until he blames someone else. I am telling you that you are the result of the lump sum of decisions you have made up to this point and you always will be."
One of Shepherd's dictums is that successful people nearly always have to shed their lives of something before moving on and told the story of a man who was stranded in the Arizona desert, his arm was caught amid a boulder avalanche, and he had to cut his arm off to find his way back to civilization. That is a metaphor for a football player cutting a posse of hangers-on, cutting the habit of watching too many video games or being addicted to their phone, cutting the tendency to ease off when fatigue and pain take over. He first addressed the Tar Heels in the spring of 2023 and his words affected everyone, Brown included.
"Shep talked about everyone needing to lose something," Brown said in August 2023 when Shepherd was invited back. "I lost my 43 pounds because I needed it. I needed to get rid of it, for you all, for me, for my health, for everything. All of us have stuff we need to get rid of."
Shepherd will return again before the season opens and his message will play into the theme of the Tar Heels as a collective looking deep into themselves and figuring out how to turn strong starts in 2022 and '23 into strong finishes through November, an ACC championship game and a bowl game.
"We were so far down when we got here, you have to learn to win," Brown says. "You do something good, and you have a setback. You dust yourself off, do something a little better and have another setback. The fact we won a Coastal Division championship but didn't finish right shows what we can do. The fact we were 6-0 and tenth in the country but didn't finish right again shows how high we can go.
"Everything we did this spring and are doing this summer is challenging everyone—players, staff, coaches, me included—figure out why. Everybody is taking responsibility for not finishing well. We have to figure it out and do better."
There are plenty of resources at the Tar Heels' disposal this summer to try and solve the riddle.
Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace (Carolina '79) has been writing about Tar Heel football under the "Extra Points" banner since 1990 and reporting from the sidelines on radio broadcasts since 2004. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.
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