Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/541265
[to] building" a championship pro- gram. Flash forward six months: Summer is in full swing, preseason camp is on the horizon and, most important, Shoop's wife and two sons are living in central Pennsylvania. Challenges certainly loom, especially with Hull and several other key players having departed, but as he explains in the following interview with BWI's Tim Owen, Shoop is feeling good about the team's defensive outlook as well as the decision to reaffirm his commitment to Penn State. How's summer going? Very well, thanks. Obviously, there's a lot of work to do. We get a little bit of time off, but between recruiting and getting our players focused, welcoming the incoming freshmen and just prepar- ing the game plans for the first few op- ponents, we're always finding some- thing to do. One of those incoming freshmen is your son Tyler. What's that mean to you? It's pretty cool. He graduated [from Father Ryan in Nashville] on May 18 and he's been up here since. The compliance rules prohibit him from working out with the team, but he's been working out with an intern and he's excited to be a part of the team. I can promise you that. He'll be a scout team receiver for us, probably, this year. He understands the game well. He wants to do whatever he can to help the team. If Coach tells him to carry the water, he'll carry the water. If Coach tells him to run routes, he'll run routes. If you bring him in to backpedal or cover a kick, he'll do whatever he needs to do. Speaking of recruits, when they make their on-campus visits, they sit down and watch a little bit of film with you. What do you take from that? First and most obvious, it's to see how much the student-athlete loves football. Is he into the film session? Is he enjoying it? Does he understand how to watch film? It's visualizing yourself playing within the framework of our scheme and then showing how our staff pictures [the recruit] fitting into the framework of our unit. It's not a monologue; it's definitely a dialogue. What do you see? Depending on the position the guy plays, especially if he's a middle linebacker or a safety, I'll ask a lot of questions. What are you see- ing there? What did you call this forma- tion in high school? It gives me an op- portunity to figure out how a guy learns best. Do you learn by visual [cues]? Do you learn on the drawing board? All those things go into it. We just spent a day with the Steelers. They talked to us about investing a sig- nificant amount of money into [an em- ployee] who can determine what type of learners their players are. They divide them into different personality types and learning skill sets. We don't have the type of money to do something like that, so this is as close as I can get to that, spending some time with the kid. How did he communicate? How will he han- dle aggressive coaching? It's just anoth- er piece of information. You emphasize the safety in your defense. One of the storylines of the spring was Jordan Lucas moving to that position. Does that mean you're comfortable with the young corner- backs? We do an exercise at the end of the season and at the end of the spring. It's called the Top 22 [in which] we rate the top 22 defensive players regardless of position. I give a sheet to each of the de- fensive coaches and they write down the top 22 players. Then we add up the points and have a system in place to fig- ure out who are the top 22 and how to get our best four players in the second- ary on the field. We evaluate them at the end of the season and the end of the spring. [We found that] we need to find a place for Grant Haley. We didn't feel like he was going to move to safety. Jordan was actually recruited to Penn State as a safety and moved to corner and has the 2 0 1 5 P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L I'm just excited to take the next step toward building another big- time defense." " B O B S H O O P Tim Owen