Derek Jeter, a longtime Michigan fan, will make an appearance at the maize and blue's Signing Day extravaganza on Wednesday. Jeter's retirement venture since retiring from the New York Yankees has been founding and managing The Players' Tribune, a website that allows athletes a first-person publishing avenue to tell their stories in their own words.
Leading into Wednesday's finish line, Harbaugh penned a piece explaining his love for Ann Arbor and why he came back to coach his alma mater. It does a nice job of explaining how and why Harbaugh turned into the tree-climbing competitive maniac he is today:
Sometimes we’d be sitting down watching TV and my dad would tell me and my brother to run upstairs and grab him something. He would time us. Every time. It was like the world record was on the line. My brother and I both wanted that world record, so we’d run upstairs as fast as we could to see who could get back to my dad first. He would make us compete.
Or maybe he just really wanted a beer as fast as he could possibly get it …
But mostly it's a window into how much Harbaugh loves Michigan and Ann Arbor, in a bit of a "hey recruits, hint hint, nudge nudge" kind of way:
From what I’ve experienced — and from what so many people I’ve talked to have experienced — whether you’re going to Michigan, you’ve just graduated or you graduated 30 years ago, you’re happy you went to Michigan. When I was going here, I was so excited to be here. I felt happy. Productive. I never thought of what it would have been like if I had gone somewhere else. After I graduated, it was the same. It just felt like this was where I was supposed to go. It didn’t feel right to go anywhere else at the time, and to this day, I can’t picture having gone anywhere else.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who feel that way about Michigan — and I’ve talked to a lot of other people who feel that way about their college, too. It happens everywhere. You probably feel that way about where you went to college.
But in my unscientific surveying of people I’ve talked to, I feel that it happens the most here at Michigan.