Iowa State football limiting contact this spring

AMES - Iowa State's spring practice, or, uh, spring development phase, as Matt Campbell is now calling it, begins Monday.

Campbell has always done the spring season a little differently than most coaches. He got rid of Iowa State's spring game three years ago.

But this year, after taking what he learned during quarantine, Campbell is making wholesale changes.

'One of the things quarantine did for me, as a young coach, was evaluate spring practice,” Campbell said. 'A lot of the things we did were done because we did them before and I didn't want to make the change because we were just starting to have success. But last year, from a health and safety standpoint, the rewards that we got kicked back to us from the quarantine was huge.”

Campbell believes his players were more fresh at the end of the season because they didn't have the toll of a full-contact spring practice wearing on them.

'We're really measuring the amount of time we put contact and collision in spring practices,” Campbell said. 'Those things will be very minimal. We'll be putting our focus on the bigger, faster, stronger growth process and equally in the fundamentals growth process. We'll save the contact and collision aspect of it for fall camp.”

Essentially, Campbell is extending winter workouts and adding a fundamentals portion, and that will be the totality of the spring.

Traditionally, when Iowa State does have full-contact practices or scrimmages, they're known for being as physical as gamedays. Reducing the amount of unnecessary hits and injuries for a season that's still six months away makes sense to Campbell and his staff.

On top of that, Campbell believes the contact during the spring is unnecessary because they're not ramping up to anything. In fall, they're ramping up to a game, so contact and physical practices are necessary. But in the spring, teams ramp up contact only to take a few months off just so they can ramp up contact for a second time. It's redundant and creates unnecessary risk.

Campbell would rather spend that time focusing on physical development and technical development.

'We took a lot of the rules we were given last year in our return-to-play model that we were given by the NCAA - that OTA-type model the NFL has - and implemented them into this spring.” Campbell said. 'We were forced to learn on the run last year, but now we were able to reflect and refine what we did for what we now deem as spring practice. We took a lot from last year as we studied it and reflected on it.

'We're doing our best to navigate it and not go overboard just because we have a spring practice this year.”

This new model has been on Campbell's mind since before the end of last season.

He brought it up as something they were planning on doing before the conference championship game and before the bowl game, as well.

He noted how fresh his team seemed to be because of the lack of a traditional spring.

He said Iowa State was getting stronger as the season and games went on last year whereas in years past, the Cyclones would fade toward the end of the season and toward the end of games.

'A lot of coaches would talk about spring practice, I'll talk about the physical development that can occur in March, April and May,” Campbell said. 'The greatest development that can occur during the spring, that I can see, isn't so much football development, but more so physical development.

'Our players benefit and we, as a program that relies on player development for success, benefit.”

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