With all the Longhorn players gathered in the meeting room, Texas assistant coaches been tasked with the opportunity to speak on a variety of topics vital to their success as a team heading into 2016.
For coaches, football is the perfect vehicle to teach players lessons about life, and Texas is utilizing their assistant coaches to teach those lessons by giving them a microphone for a few minutes and letting them present to the team.
Over the past few days linebackers coach Brian Jean-Mary has talked about adversity, offensive line coach Matt Mattox has tackled attitude, and defensive line coach Brick Haley has talked about discipline.
Matt Mattox explains to players what attitude is, and what it means:
"There are two things that you can control everyday - your attitude and effort. You've heard that from pee-wee ball all the way up through college. Everything that we do has to be a way of thinking, a way of acting, and a way of doing. That's what your attitude does. It defines you."
"The great thing about our attitude is that we can change it. We don't have to keep it the same. You may have been raised a certain way, and had experiences a certain way, and have thoughts about certain things, but all of that can change. That can be unlearned."
https://youtu.be/GwXW_JfYjEA
To lead off his talk on discipline, Haley led with a quote:
"Discipline is a constant battle between your future self, and your present self. Do not let your present self short cut and find the easy way to do things and ruin the visions and plans you have lain out for your future self."
https://youtu.be/D_LuRqDucWg
Jean-Mary shared some really good thoughts on adversity as well, including this gem:
"To me, adversity is when you come to a crossroads. It's not the beginning and it's not the end, it's 'right now, I have a choice on how I'm going to handle a situation.'"
https://youtu.be/52EGFyofOd0