The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/402034
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Jerry Hanlon and all of those guys were just wonderful young coaches. "Bo was just so dynamic. He put a presence about himself that you didn't want to mess with him. There cer- tainly was a fear factor there without any question. He conducted himself in that fashion. "He was a great motivator, a great speaker. He demanded toughness, right from the get-go. There was a lot of attrition level. Our freshman class, in a year or two, we'd lost half our class to injury or they just went back home, homesick or whatever it might be." The stories reverberate about Michi- gan's extensive attrition. The Wolver- ines featured the kind of numbers that allowed practices to be as brutal, or more so, as the games on the schedule. "They were very, very physical," Eaton said. "Bo pretty much had the philosophy that if we don't practice tough like this, we're not going to play tough in the games. I don't mean this in a cruel fashion, but if injuries hap- pen, they happen. He never let that outweigh the fact that he wasn't going to go soft in practice." A host of players who performed under Elliott just drifted away af- ter the first few weeks and months. "Those Who Stay Will Be Champions" became the motto, but it wasn't going to be easy. Even so, Eaton insists he never con- sidered leaving. "Not at all," he said. "When I came here, I came out of a high school pro- gram that was very small, but my high school coach prepared us. He was a tough guy. We practiced hard. "When I got here, I met friends for life immediately. I'm not saying we enjoyed it, because we would com- plain with the best of them about what was going on, 'Man is this crazy,' etc. But the fact was, we were all in it to- gether. "That's what happens with teams, and that's what I learned. There were days you walked out of there and you may have wondered, but I never thought twice about quitting. None of my buddies really did, either." In addition to toughness, Eaton learned efficiency and precision. Prac- tices involved no wasted second, play- ers sprinting from one drill to the next. Meanwhile, no single practice play ever measured up, in the grand tradi- After 17 years in education, 16 of them at Clinton (Mich.) High School, Eaton went on to run plant operations for School-Tech Inc., a school supply company based in Ann Arbor. PHOTO COURTESY DON EATON