These are changing times for sure. Nick Saban admitted as much during a 15-minute Instagram Live interview with ESPN’s Maria Taylor on Tuesday where he declared that self-isolation caused by the COVID-19 outbreak has forced him to finally get an email account.
“The one positive for me is I have an email now,” Saban said with a smile. “I’ve come a long way. It was hard to communicate when you have to be by yourself and you depend on somebody else to get your emails, messages and all that. It just didn’t work.
“They were sending them all to Miss Terry, and she fired me. She said, ‘I’m not dealing with your stuff anymore,' so I had to do it on my own."
Yes, you heard it right. Saban is now keeping up with the times. The same coach who previously claimed he doesn’t know how to reply to text messages is now Zooming with his staff for daily meetings and FaceTiming recruits at night. As for those text messages, they’re still a work in progress.
“'Call me' is about as far as I go with the text part of it, but I can actually get an email and read what somebody (sends me),” Saban said. “It’s like I’ve really come a long way.”
Saban said there hasn’t been much entertainment during quarantine. However, technology has allowed the coach to keep to his typical busy routine throughout the day.
“What I’ve tried to do on a daily basis is from 7:30 in morning we have a Zoom staff meeting,” he began. “We are working on next year’s opponents now, sort of in the a.m. We have quite a few new opponents this year, which this is a good time to use to learn about some of those new opponents.
“Basically, what we do in the afternoon and early evening is at two o’clock we’re having a Zoom with our players, and then from three o’clock to about a couple hours in the afternoon and a couple hours at night I do videos with recruits, phone calls with recruits.”
Saban reiterated his statements from last week’s teleconference with local reporters, stating that his goals are to continue to develop relationships in recruiting, work on next year’s opponents and also remain engaged in his players and their well-being and academics.
“We have a check-in with every player on Zoom, so every position coach has all his players on Zoom,” Saban said Wednesday. “‘How you doing academically, what’s the wellness of your family and yourself, any issues or problems?’ Then we do sort of a football install where we might take a play on offense whether it’s counter or power or whatever and sort of show them videos of it and the coaching points of how we make this play work whether its with the running backs or the offensive line or whatever. That’s basically what we’re trying to do to keep the players engaged. It’s worked as well as we’ve anticipated to this point.”
The evening calls to recruits have been handled in a similar fashion.
“Whatever we can present to them on video that they would have seen when they came here to visit, which now they can’t come here and visit and there is no practice for them to watch or whatever," he said. "We’re trying to supplement some of those things to continue to develop relationships however we can.”
As of this week, the SEC has allowed four hours of video conferencing with players per week. Saban said those virtual meetings are being held from Monday through Thursday. The head coach also stated that Alabama is continuing some of its other scheduled programs, including a leadership seminar which is held online on Fridays. The mental conditioning program is also available online to players on an individual basis.
“We’re trying to do all the things if the players were here,” Saban said, “now using technology the best we can even though they’re not here.”
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