Kelly Brings In Navy SEAL To Address Players

The Eagles’ schedule for the first two days of training camp has included a 45-minute block known as a High Performance Mindset Meeting.

What does that mean, exactly?

“It’s just making sure you can optimize absolutely everything about your training, your practice, your recovery so you can get the most [out of] every single day and you can be ready to go on gamedays,” said undrafted free agent Jake Knott. “That training curve that you’ve been at, you raise that up a little bit and everybody else is staying a little bit lower because you’re optimizing everything.”

The session included a guest speaker, Coleman Ruiz, who served 12 years as a Navy SEAL officer. According to his bio on TheProgram.org, Ruiz led about 85 combat operations as a troop commander and served at the highest levels of special operations.

“It’s awesome when Coach [Chip] Kelly brings in guys like that to talk to us about their mindset, what they think about, what their mentality is,” said James Casey. “They’re life and death with what they’re doing. And we’re just out here playing a game. So when he talks to us about what his mindset is and how he trains, it really resonates with us and it means a lot to have guys like that come out and talk to us.”

Asked what the one thing was that stood out from the session, Casey said, “Just warrior-mindset [when] you’re training. When they’re training, you rise to the level of your training. …You don’t just go out there on gameday and perform, doing [something] you’ve never done before. You don’t go out there and perform better than you ever did in practice. You practice at a certain level. You expect yourself to practice higher than everyone else in the league is going to practice so when it comes to gamedays, we can wear people down… we’ve trained harder so we’re going to be able to perform better when it comes to the fourth quarter.”

Jason Kelce, meanwhile, took away a lesson on leadership. In The Tao of Chip Kelly, author Mark Saltveit writes about how Kelly had 16 team leaders at Oregon, rather than a couple captains. It sounds like Ruiz stressed the idea of shared responsibility to Eagles players.

“Everybody gets caught up in leadership and the one or two guys who are their leaders,” Kelce said. “When you’re really clicking on all cylinders, everybody’s a leader, and everybody’s just kind of following each other. That’s really what you aim to be at is everybody’s gotta be kind of setting an example and responsible to each other and doing it the right way.

“He [Ruiz] has given us a few tidbits that’ll make us a better unit on the field, a better unit off the field as well.”

Follow Sheil Kapadia on Twitter and e-mail him at skapadia@phillymag.com.
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