Short excerpt of a Ryan Day speech (YouTube) about preseason preparation and team culture. Day uses a preseason metaphor—‘giving a brick’ each day—to describe building a foundation, and argues that storms (injuries, weather, losses) reveal character. He frames adversity as an opportunity to demonstrate resilience, perseverance, and the team’s fighting culture, with lessons for players, families, and Buckeye Nation.
Chapters
We started off in the preseason, and we. We talked about building a foundation, and you don't know if that foundation is strong enough until you go through storms along the way. And I think it's having a plan along the way, and so I won't get into all the details, but we would give a brick out every day at practice, and we would go and put it on a pallet out here. And that. That foundation that we're putting every day is going to tell us if we're able to withstand storms along the way, which is just like life. It's just like life when you're. Your faith, your family and your friends, those relationships that you're pouring into your life, you know, when you hit tough times in your life, you're going to find out what kind of foundation you have. It's the same thing with the team. And so we knew that we're going to hit storms along the way, and so what's going to happen? And so those are the conversations that we had going into the season. We knew those things were going to be in place. We didn't know what they were going to be. Injuries, you know, weather, losses. Never imagined it would play out the way it did at the end of the season. Couldn't imagine it, but it did. Okay. And this was an opportunity for us to not only do this as a team, but it was an opportunity for all of us to help learn a life lesson for the guys in that room, our families, the people in the building, Ohio, you know, and everybody that's in Buckeye Nation to see, okay, when things get really hard, what do you do? Do you just fold? Do you turn on each other? Or do you get back up and you fight and you continue to. Because that's it. Fight. I mean, that's our whole culture here. Fight. And so that's what we did. And we felt like if we could do that, we could write an unbelievable story. But it had to start with that first game, and you had to build some momentum. And in that life, like, when things get really, really good, you got to get all you can get. But when things get bad, you just got to hang in there. And that's a defining moment to show your character. And I believe when adversity hits, it's an opportunity to show character to those who care about you the most. And I think that that resilience and perseverance paid off for us in that moment.
