How 2 days in February with a Marine changed NC State football and got it to Gator Bowl
In the wee hours of a miserable February morning, Shyheim Battle and his N.C. State teammates made their way into the indoor practice facility.
Slowly, 100 or more players step inside the Close-King building, located next to Carter-Finley Stadium. It was in that stadium two months earlier the Wolfpack ended a 4-8 season. Nobody in the program wanted a repeat of 2019 and no matter what it took, they were determined to take the appropriate steps to make 2020 better.
That first step started on that cold morning. The players, as they typically do with offseason workouts, were all matching — gray N.C. State shirts, red shorts, everyone wearing the same sneakers and socks.
The night before they were instructed to pack a gear bag. Each player had to have the exact same items and the bag would be inspected before they started drills. The bag had to include deodorant, an extra shirt, a towel and a sandwich. Inspecting the bags would be former Marine James Slife and his staff.
Slife was there to put the players through ‘The Program’ a two-day, military-style exercise with the main purpose of putting the team in uncomfortable situations, forcing them to bond through shared adversity. At the time, none of the players knew how important those two days were. Talk to any member of the team now and they will all admit it was probably the biggest reason they finished 8-3 this season, with a chance for win No. 9 at the Gator Bowl versus Kentucky on Jan. 2.
Wolfpack coach Dave Doeren wasn’t a stranger to Slife and his team. He brought them to Raleigh after his second season. N.C. State wasn’t good in 2013, winning just three games. Doeren wanted to find a way to build camaraderie and accountability. The next season, the team went 8-5 and State played in five straight bowl games. Following the 2019 season in which the Wolfpack went 4-8, Doeren figured it was time to bring Slife back. He wanted to make sure everyone who participated in ‘The Program’ the first time was no longer around. He wanted it — needed it, really — to be a new experience.
And there stood Battle, with his teammates, in a line, going through roll call, not knowing what to expect. The next two days, however, would change the DNA of the team and set the blueprint for a successful 2020 season.
“This team, we’ve had a lot of growth from last year,” Battle said. “Guys aren’t just playing for themselves, they are making sacrifices for each other.”
RESISTANT AT FIRST
Slife spent 23 years in the Marines, 22 in Special Operations. He started working with ‘The Program’ in 2009. The mission statement of ‘The Program’ is “To build better leaders and create more cohesive teams through shared adversity.”
“What we do is we go in to talk about the standards that you’re going to be held to as a leader,” Slife told the News & Observer. “Then you talk about the standards you’re going to be held to as a teammate. The standard to a leader is accomplishing your mission and, No. 2, take care of your people and take care of your team, (which) means make every decision while trying to accomplish the mission with your team’s best interest.”
The day before they started the two-day exercise, Slife met the team in the Murphy Center. Slife was welcomed with the body language he expects when a military man stands in front of a bunch of college students — slouched in their seats, arms folded, standoffish. But, true to his word, Slife and his staff don’t change their standards.
The next morning, the N.C. State team lined up and Slife and his staff had to build trust, but, again, that didn’t mean compromising the standard. In the first quarter of drills, the team had to do a series of exercises together on the same beat. Typically, Slife said, the first quarter should take 16 minutes. For the Pack, it took 1 hour and 15 minutes.
“Because they were resistant to it,” Slife said. “The time keeps starting over and you (could) see the frustration.”
A perfect jumping jack, or a perfect push up, meant all 100 bodies moving in unison. The team talks about ‘One Pack, One Goal’ and Slife wanted them to live that message. It was harder than they thought.
“Everybody had to be perfect,” Battle said. “Like, one perfect jumping jack.”
Other drills included a relay race, where players had to carry a sandbag, 25 yards and back. While one player was doing that, the rest of his teammates were holding a wooden pole over their heads, waiting for the player to return. Once they returned to the pole position, the next player took the sandbag and ran 25 yards and back. If the team dropped the wood, they had to start over. That was just Day 1. Day 2 took them inside to the pool.
They were instructed to show up in shorts and a hoodie. They jumped in the deep end and the objective was to switch hoodies with your partner in 90 seconds. The players found themselves in 12 feet of water, some of them who couldn’t swim, trusting their life in the hands of their teammate.
“I’m not a great swimmer. I needed some people to help me out,” All-ACC linebacker Payton Wilson said. “And I was helping people. It was just great to see everyone helping each other out. Because I mean, if you can’t swim, you drown.”
It was the days at the pool where the team learned a lot about themselves and what they can handle.
“They start to doubt themselves again, which means they start to divide again and what happens is they stop believing in themselves,” Slife said about the pool drills. “It’s a moment of adversity, complete adversity for the ones who can’t swim. Now what happens in times of adversity, happens in times of adversity. Doesn’t matter if it’s a pool or a big game. What you do is, you don’t fall back. The way that we react is the way that we react.”
Slife has an acronym he likes to use for the word fear. In the pool situation, players either ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.’
Once they accomplished the goal, Slife said he could see the change happening in real time.
“Watching them come together is a proud moment for me,” Slife said. “They took it and ran with it.”
Slife said he just planted the seed, it was the players who learned something from the experiences and capitalized during the season when they faced tough times. It’s a reason that N.C. State was able to hang tough in so many one possession games. There’s a reason the Wolfpack didn’t blink when it trailed Pittsburgh by 5 points with less than 2 minutes to go and drove 79 yards in eight plays to win. On the road at Syracuse, the Wolfpack trailed by 9 in the second half but found a way to rally for a win; they knew they could depend on the man next to them dating back to their two-day experiences with Slife.
When Slife watched N.C. State play this season, during tough times, he knew in his heart they learned from those two days.
“That field work and that pool work is an experience that they have,” Slife said. “If the pool is forgotten, if that day on the field is forgotten, then it’s just a hard workout that they remember for the rest of their lives. But if we capitalize on that moment, what were we feeling during that time, to go back and reflect on those moments, that’s when we had true gain.”
A TEAM BOND
Doeren could see the gains before the first game. After the two days with Slife were completed, the veteran coach noticed how his team attacked winter workouts with a different zest.
That carried over to the few spring practices they had before COVID.
“Offense and defense, you know, wanting to outdo each other but at the same time wanting to help each other,” Doeren said. “A cooperative competition, I guess you would say, which is different. Sometimes you’re just at each other’s throats during spring ball. And this was different. You can tell that the guys were trying to help each other get better.”
Battle, who redshirted in 2019, and Wilson, who just finished his third year at N.C. State, both point to ‘The Program’ for not only changing practice habits, but the entire mood inside the program.
“That’s something we really struggled with last year,” Wilson said. “When something happened, we would just point fingers at each other, but this year, let’s fix it and move on. You know, the team has really become a brotherhood. Everyone likes everyone. We’re always talking hanging out outside of football.”
Battled added: “That kind of got everybody bonded together. There’s no separation and no individualism, stuff like that. We got rid of a lot of bad energy last year. You have a problem, you go to the captain.”
One of those team captains is junior linebacker Isaiah Moore. During those two days of drills, Moore said he found his voice. He was asked to lead several drills, which gave him confidence.
Slife mentioned Moore specifically when talking about players who stepped up and didn’t mind giving directions and leading during the hard days of ‘The Program.’ Doeren knew Moore had the potential to lead, but what ‘The Program’ did for guys like Moore and others was put their abilities as leaders on full display. Doeren saw who wasn’t afraid to be vocal and who was still unsure of themselves.
“There’s a lot of guys that have played a lot of football here but it helped to get them out there in front,” Doeren said. “And it builds confidence when you can get up there and be successful in a situation like that.”
That confidence is why when nationally ranked Liberty was driving into N.C. State territory on Nov. 21, with the Wolfpack up a point, there wasn’t a worry. The team knew someone would make a play. It happened to be Vi Jones, who blocked a field-goal attempt by the Flames with 1:18 remaining.
N.C. State football players had built so much trust in each other during those two days in February, discovering how to stand tall during adversity, that they always knew they would find a way to execute on the field. The product on the field was better in 2020 because the team overcame shared adversity for 48 hours in February. Slife knows that his two days in Raleigh was a mission accomplished.
“It’s a proud moment,” Slife said. “To watch a team grasp those concepts that were resistant at first, to now, 11 months later, it’s what every man wants, wants to know that he made a difference.”
This story was originally published December 29, 2020 at 2:58 PM with the headline "How 2 days in February with a Marine changed NC State football and got it to Gator Bowl."
