Herm Edwards is in his third season as coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. When the Chiefs open training camp on July 24 at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, it will mark his 29th camp as a player, scout, assistant coach or head coach. Edwards previously was head coach of the New York Jets, worked as a scout and assistant coach with the Chiefs, assistant head coach with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and was a cornerback for the Philadelphia Eagles, Los Angeles Rams, and Atlanta Falcons.
As told to NFL.com Senior Columnist Vic Carucci
What training camp, for years, has meant to me -- whether I was a player, a scout, an assistant head coach or a head coach -- is camaraderie. How you build your football team, I believe, is in training camp. Basically, there are no distractions. It's all about football. Everyone knows his purpose and why he's going there.
It's about guys competing for their job. It's about the veteran guy saying, "I can still do this." It's about the rookie that you drafted or the rookie free agent saying, "I'm fighting for a job." You learn a lot about your football team in that environment. For that month that you're there, you're going to learn a lot about your players, you're going to learn a lot about your coaching staff.
It's kind of like when your parents sent you to camp with a bunch of guys that, really, you don't know because you don't know all of them. You kind of know them from minicamp. You meet them, you talk to them, but you really don't know them. When you get in training camp, you eat with them every day, you work out with them every day. And after about the fifth day, you watch for the guys who are still practicing and you watch for the guys who are not practicing. All of a sudden, you start saying, "I can go into a fight with that guy. I trust that guy."
Training camp separates people. You find out who the tough guys are, physically and mentally. Now, you've put pads on for three or four days, and all of a sudden some guys aren't showing up. They're in the tub. Their shoulder hurts. And you see some guys who just keep showing up and they just keep hitting. You find out the guys you can count on -- the ones who continue to practice when they're a little nicked, when they're a little tired, when they're the star and know they can get a day off but they still show up. And they give effort in practice; they're always improving.
When I see that, I say, "Okay, this guy's putting money in the bank for when November starts." He'll have the stamina for that push in the second half of the season. I think the things you do in training camp should prepare you for November. And the guys that don't finish training camp because they're hurt or they don't go hard enough, you'll see their play dwindle in November.
Having played for and gone through the very tough training camps of Dick Vermeil in Philadelphia gave me a great mental toughness and stamina. I played for Dick all of those years, and I never missed a practice or a game. I prided myself on that. Back then, it was two months of training camp and we would have triple days -- two hour-and-a-half practices in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. I didn't know any better. You also went to camp with 125 guys, but Dick's approach broke a lot of guys down at the end. For me, it didn't, because I was always in shape. But when you have guys who are not in shape, it can break your football team down if you take them too far over the edge.
My greatest camp memory was during my rookie year, when the Eagles trained at Widener University in Chester, Pa. We would walk to the practice field, which was about a quarter of a mile from the locker room, and I got a great perspective of how to be a professional football player because I made the walk every day with our quarterback, Roman Gabriel, who was entering what would be the last of his 16 seasons in the NFL. He would talk with me about what it took to be a pro besides having ability -- how you had to work at it. Even at that stage of his career, Roman was still in great shape. He was always the first one in the locker room, he was lifting weights, he was always prepared. And he taught me the things you had to do in the offseason, the things you had to do to prepare yourself to play in games. I'll never forget that.
We're going to training camp with 35 rookies this summer, which makes for a little bit of a harder camp in the fact that there will be more teaching, more direction, more details. We've kind of already done that in the offseason. And then we've got to get those players to believe in what we're asking them to do and simplify it for them, so that they can do it fast. There'll be some mistakes, but you've got to live with that and I'm okay with that, as long as they don't repeat them, because they'll learn something. As I always say to coaches, either you're coaching the mistake or you're allowing it to happen. If you're coaching it, then you've got to change that. And if you're allowing it to happen, then you've got to change that, too.
During camp, I always try to talk to about three or four different players every day for the sake of communicating. Not about football. It's just, "How are you doing?" The conversations aren't long, five or 10 minutes, but they need to feel me. That's the bond I always have with players. At the end, they know who their coach is. And, eventually, I get to every player.
GM's perspective: Bill Polian
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Bill Parcells once mentioned that he was like an old fire horse. When you hear the bell ring, you respond, no matter how longyou've been doing it. That happens to me about the 15th of July. Your body starts to transition into a training-camp mode. ** More ...**
Player's perspective: Ronde Barber
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Training camp is a time to reestablish yourself. You do that in minicamps and OTAs and everything else during the offseason, but you don't get a real feel for your team or where you're going to be on your team until training camp. ** More ...**
Some days I might focus in on a certain group. I might sit in with those players during their positional meeting at night just to hear what their coach is telling them. Then, the next morning at practice, if a player from that group isn't following what he was taught, I can say to him, "The coach said that last night, right?" The player says, "Yeah." And I say, "You've got to repeat what the coach says. That's what the meetings are for. Take what you learn in the classroom to the grass."
At least one time a day, I'll get involved with hands-on coaching with the defensive backs, linebackers and wide receivers. When they see me turn my hat around, they know I'm coming to work. It's just another way of getting to know your players. They get excited when I come over to mess with them.
I enjoyed the fact that the Chiefs participated last year in the HBO series, "Hard Knocks," because people got to really see how hard it is to be a professional football player. They got to see what players go through in camp and what coaches go through, too -- the decisions you have to make along the way and how you make those decisions. People don't always understand those decisions because a lot of times, they don't have the same information that the coaches do. They can't because they're not there all the time. But when you watch a show like that, you say, "Oh, that's why he made that decision."
When it comes to the decision-making process, I'm pretty even-keeled. I take the emotion out of it. You always have the facts and you try to do what's right for the football team. That's always tough because there are things you've got to do that don't always correspond with what everybody else is thinking. But at the end, you have to make those decisions and when you make them, you have to stick by them.
