FEATURE: A Day on Leach Beach

STARKVILLE – Imagine for a moment that it's a bright, sunny, summer day. It's hot, so you head to the beach and kick off your shoes. You feel your toes sink into the cool sand. Then a whistle blows.

This is "Leach Beach." And, like Mississippi State's head football coach, it's a little bit different.

"Leach Beach, it's not a fun beach," junior linebacker Jordan Davis said.

On his first tour of the Bulldogs' facilities the day he was hired, Mike Leach had two questions: "Do you guys have a sandpit?" and "How big is it?"

State constructed an additional sandpit on the northeast corner of the football practice field complex this offseason. The football team noticed the new construction, but at first, they didn't know why it was being built. Meanwhile, MSU's social media team saw an opportunity and created a postcard for social media with Leach reclining in a folding chair on the sand.

Here was a coach that many call "The Pirate" due to his fascination with the swashbucklers, seemingly working to pull a treasured value out of the sand. And while the Leach Beach makes for catchy marketing, it serves an important purpose for head strength and conditioning coach Tyson Brown.

"Making it a gimmick doesn't change what it does for us, or the training affect it gives," Brown said. "It is fun because the guys know it's not your typical day at the beach. You will have to grind, tough it out and finish the right way when you are fatigued."

This beach is no place to relax. You come here to work. Some people may jog along the shore on the coast, but this takes that exercise and magnifies it. That sort of pacing won't cut it.

"It ain't nothing but work. That's all it is," senior Greg Eiland said. "You get in there and let that sand get loose up under your feet and you have to drive up out of there and work hard. It can be fun if you go out there and attack it though."

The 60-yard-long beach is set up with a grid of cones on Wednesdays in the summer for a series of agility drills. Brown's staff starts off with simple agility drills and clear directions at first.

As the sessions continue Brown's staff changes cone patterns and coaching cues. They add in distractions and turn the music up loud. The coaches force players to react to the strength staff rather than predict the next cone they're sprinting to. When even one person breaks in the wrong direction, the group starts over. It's all part of Leach's goal to have everyone on the same page and able to communicate with non-verbal cues in preparation for Saturdays.

"A day at Leach Beach, you're going to be frustrated," sophomore Martin Emerson said. "You're going to be mentally and physically tired. You've got to push through it. Your teammates, they're going to always be there for you. I love it. It's who's going to stand the tallest. It's a test."

The sand may be new for the Bulldogs, but by now it's routine for Leach. He's been using it since his days at Texas Tech in the early 2000s.

"This is my seventh season with Coach and ever since I joined the staff, the sandpit has always been a huge focus," Brown said. "He has a fascination and an appreciation with the work you can do in the sandpit. When he hired me on staff, I knew that this was something we would have to take care of pretty quickly."

Without spring practice and a shortened summer conditioning window, the beach became that much more important this year.

"The sandpit allowed for us to get a lot of work done without beating up ankles, knees, hips, and the lower backs of our larger athletes," Brown said. "We do a lot of change in direction and conditioning in the sandpit, which allows us to work their legs and lungs without the beating up their joints and ligaments. It was huge for us because it allowed us to add in the volume of conditioning in quicker and get them up to speed faster."

Emerson said he's already felt a difference, and Davis was one of Brown's most-improved student-athletes thanks to the sand.

"[Davis] is going to empty the tank," Brown said, "For the first few weeks he was emptying the tank too quickly. Around week six, he adapted, started to prepare his body the right way for those sessions and was doing a really great job in the sandpit."

"I feel like workouts have turned me into a whole different beast," Davis said. "I think our coaches really put it around the mental part of it. It's not just the physical part. It's all about the mental game; If you're strong or if you're not."

That mental growth is a point of pride for Brown. During their preseason media day with MSU's video team, nearly every student-athlete said the Leach Beach was the toughest part of their conditioning program. Some even went as far as to label it the toughest workout of their career.

Brown hopes when the fourth quarter rolls around, they'll look back on their time on the Beach when they were tired and still managed to execute their roles. It's a tenet of Leach's program. Two of his most common sayings are "Do your job" and "Be brilliant at the basics."

"A lot of what we do in the sand is not a secret or fancy," Brown said. "We don't do any crazy drills in there. We are just going to execute the little things better than anyone else."

Mississippi State University Athletics

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Jordan Davis

Greg Eiland

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