The Kansas football team has reaped the benefits of upgraded facilities during its fall training camp, and strength coach Matt Gildersleeve reckons it’s been by far the Jayhawks’ healthiest camp since he and Lance Leipold arrived on campus in 2021.
Over the past three weeks in the renovated Anderson Family Football Complex, KU’s players have gotten to take advantage of new amenities like cryotherapy, a sauna and massage chairs, and have returned to the lavish locker and weight rooms that opened in 2023.
It’s a stark contrast from the sorts of spaces they had at their disposal earlier this year, due to the extensive construction at and around David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium.
“We didn’t have anything really for them to use this whole entire spring ball and offseason, right?” Gildersleeve told the Journal-World in a recent interview. “We had two kind of makeshift tubs up in the storage closet of the indoor (practice facility), and then the training room was the size of this to that” — he gestured from the first row of chairs lined up in one of KU’s positional meeting rooms to the front of the room — “and that was about it.”
Gildersleeve is still eagerly awaiting his first offseason in the new weight room, which opened in August 2023. But as one of the progenitors of the team’s culture, he also expressed a desire to make sure having such luxuries doesn’t erode the personality he and Leipold have tried to instill in the program — one that might even be more congruent with the environment the players dealt with earlier in the offseason.
“It’s not sexy, fancy,” he said. “It’s blue-collar hard work.”
That ethos needs to persist, he said, into future generations of the program.
“Luke Grimm, Devin Neal, Jalon Daniels, they know what this place was,” Gildersleeve said. “Deshawn Warner, Jon Jon Kamara, Isaiah Marshall, they don’t. So I think it’s important that we continue to, as those guys get older, remind them what this was and what it took to build it to where it is now and keep us humble in those regards.”
Kansas wide receiver Luke Grimm (11) has his helmet ripped off for an Illinois penalty to help set up a Kansas touchdown during the first quarter on Friday, Sept. 8, 2023 at Memorial Stadium.
Kansas quarterback Isaiah Marshall tosses the ball during fall camp on Monday, August 5, 2024, in Lawrence.
Gildersleeve said it’s more difficult to maintain a culture than to establish one in the first place.
“Culture is a daily fistfight,” he said. “People on the outside think … ‘Man, Kansas, they really got it going, they got a great culture, that thing probably runs itself.’ I cannot tell you how untrue that statement is.”
The day-to-day effort to reinforce KU’s culture among younger players, he says, will depend on “what you focus on as the leader, what do you talk about, what do you coach, what do you demand.”
“At the end of the day,” he added, “we’re going to get this program to where it needs to go with people, not necessarily just with bricks.”
Part of why instilling cultural principles in young players is so urgent is that KU has 30 seniors on its roster, which Gildersleeve said is in some ways like having “30 mini little Coach Leipolds” looking for ways to elevate the program and hold their teammates accountable.
He remarked that he didn’t have to repeat one of his mantras — that the Jayhawks didn’t come to KU to “play weightlifting,” but to play football — during this edition of fall camp because tight end Jared Casey said it for him.
The wide receiver Grimm is a defining example of the sort of oversight the seniors have provided, Gildersleeve said.
“Where he is now compared to where he was this time a year ago from every perspective, leadership, and with that comes his personal performance and what he’s done, it’s just night and day,” Gildersleeve said. “Luke Grimm’s out there, when he doesn’t think the effort’s good enough, he’s calling on it, and so you see it everywhere, for sure.”
At the start of fall camp, Grimm, the senior wide receiver, had been circumspect about his legacy and those of his fellow wideouts; he talked about “leaving this place at a good spot for all these young guys below us, where they don’t have to go through the bad times, but they need to keep these good times rolling.”
The present
More immediately, one group effort in which all players and coaches have had a role to play this offseason is preventing any sort of self-satisfaction ahead of the 2024 season, as the Jayhawks have encountered greater success and national attention.
It’s been a consistent message from the start of the spring, when Gildersleeve said, “In the grand scheme of what we’re trying to accomplish, what do we have to be complacent about?”, and continued through the summer, when Neal said, “We don’t have time to mope around or act like we’ve been here before, because we haven’t.”
With the offseason drawing to a close, Gildersleeve said the effort to eliminate that sort of attitude had been successful overall, owing in large part to the way the coaches chose to begin the offseason in their first team meeting on Jan. 16.
“We started off by saying, ‘Anybody who’s satisfied with what we’ve done in this program, you better hit that portal because that ain’t where we’re going to go,'” he recalled. “‘We’re going to continue to take this thing in the next level and elevate.'”
The message was received.
“I think our players have heard it enough now, to where they know what they want to achieve and they know we have a lot of work, even to this day,” Gildersleeve said. “There is nobody out there on those practice fields thinking that we’ve arrived and that we’re in a good spot. Everyone thinks that there is a lot of urgency (that) we need to get better, we are not good enough right now, and you can sense that, that guys have that urgency to continue to get better.”