Exclusive: New Daily Routine For Tom Izzo and Michigan State Basketball
East Lansing, MI—Tom Izzo’s Hall of Fame career has seen many things and made many changes with the times. But as the COVID-19 pandemic has hit sports hard, he has to change again. While not a tech-savvy person, he now is using the internet more than ever to meet with his players and staff daily. He disused that with Spartan Nation.
“You know we’re working on all those things. For the most part, I’m texting or calling my guys every other day, and you know it’s a new normal for them too. We got about six guys up here, got some back home, some of our guys are in places that were harm’s way, you know like Detroit with Rocket and Gabe, you know it’s scary. Up here right now, there’s not many people up here, but to think they’re sitting in apartments and having to figure out how to do sit up and pushups and keep themselves active is difficult. I mean everybody’s going through difficult times and a lot of people a lot worse than my guys. I’m trying to stay in contact with them, and we’re working on some things. There’s NCAA laws, we’re not allowed to have a, we wanted to have like a Zoom workout you know, everybody was in their little apartments, and we do sit-ups together or stretching together, it keeps the camaraderie, believe it or not, we’re not allowed to do that. We’re not allowed anything mandatory. So, we’re trying to send out things for them to do and trying to get out and go for walks, and of course, abide by the social distancing and all those things. But just keep your spirits up, you know an athlete is usually regimented in what he does, some of those guys, it seems like that championship game was a year ago and was it now four weeks from Sunday. So, it’s been a long time, and yet our guys are just trying to adjust, and I’m trying to do the same thing. Figure out different ways to communicate with recruits, different ways to communicate with players, different ways to communicate with my staff, and I think everybody needed a week or two to just spend time with their family and try to figure out. Still, we do have obligations for these players, and just trying to help them is hard. I stay in touch with the players’ parent because if my kid was away at college and something like this was going on, I’d be worried, I’d feel bad. So, I’m trying to be a person wearing a lot of different hats these last couple of weeks, like we all got to kind of do.”
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