Arizona’s new special teams coach Jeremy Springer showed up to the Lowell-Stevens Football Facility after spring practice Wednesday evening with bountiful energy and enthusiasm. This could be a sign of things to come under the Kevin Sumlin regime. The former UTEP linebacker spent three years under Sumlin at his previous stop at Texas A&M .
The one thing you’ll notice about Springer is his youth. He’s only 29 years of age, but he prides himself on the energy and positive attitude he shows every single day.
“Every day you’ve gotta bring something to the table. I love my life,” Springer said. “I come to work every day, [and] this is what I wear (T-shirt and shorts). I coach kids from Chicago, from Louisiana, from California. And we try to build a championship program. There are a lot of people who wish they were in my shoes, and I know that. I don’t take it for granted. Working at A&M; seeing that culture that was build there helped me advance to come here and try to do the same things and add my own kind of spice to it, because now I’m running it.”
As a new coach in a brand-new program with responsibilities bestowed upon him that weren’t there for him at Texas A&M, Springer is making a point to make special teams his own.
“You’re going to hear me say it a lot. I want guys to come out there and have fun with it. I don’t want to be that stagnant group where people are quiet and don’t want to be here. I want to make it fun for them. A lot of guys don’t come here to play special teams. Let’s just be honest. They come here to play offense and defense. Maybe they were the best player at their high school. They come here, they’ve gotta make a role for themselves. I try to make them get involved a little more. Through my presentations, through my actions every day — I want to make it fun for the guys,” Springer said.
As a native Texan, Springer will be in charge of recruiting in Central Texas in places like Houston and Austin, while also keeping an eye on any specialists nationwide that might be needed in the Old Pueblo.
As spring practices rage on, the competition for places is one of the most important talking points and story lines, but Springer isn’t worried about that. He approaches the first camp of the year with a completely clean slate, player evaluation-wise.
“Last year was a different system. This year is our system, the way we do things. I’m going to evaluate based on that. Totally different techniques. You know PowerPoint, right? All of a sudden, they switch you to Excel. It’s totally different, right? You can’t judge it off PowerPoint, right? That’s how I view special teams. It’s a totally different system, a way of thinking, a way of reading things,” Springer said.
As the Wildcats look to improve on special teams, where they ranked one of the worst units in the country, Springer looks to change the culture around that area of the game.
“The reason we were successful at A&M is that we put such a high importance on it. Jeff Banks and him built a culture there. The culture was playing special teams with an excellence, to a standard. That’s what we’re trying to build here,” Springer said.
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