AUDIO: Listen to full interview
SEWARD, Neb. – Concordia University head football coach Patrick Daberkow joined 104.9 Max Country Sports Director Evan Jones for an update on the program as it navigates the current health pandemic. The interview was recorded on Tuesday (May 5). Click the link above to listen to the full interview.
Patrick Daberkow Interview transcript:
Keeping in touch with players: Nothing substitutes fully for face-to-face interaction, but our staff has been busy with Zoom calls, text messages, FaceTimes and phone calls. We’re contacting them almost on a daily basis. We’re sending them quite a bit of emails. I go through our roster and our incoming recruits and make sure I’m hitting up everybody at least once per week to stay in touch with them, whether that’s a phone call, a text message or whatever.
Workouts: Our strength coach Todd Berner has all of our guys using an app on their phones. We send them workouts every day through the app. For guys who do not have access to a weight room, there are options for those guys. It’s a pretty slick program. It’s called TeamBuildr. It’s really helped us stay organized during this. It’s a really good platform to communicate workouts and things of that nature.
Recruiting: It’s been really good. We’re able to get in touch with our class of 2021 – kids who are juniors right now – faster than we ever have without spring ball. We’ve focused all of our attention on in-state recruiting. It’s been really good to reach out to prospects and put together our lists and have a plan of attack earlier than we normally do.
Fall uncertainty: We turn the news off. That’s the best thing that we can do. We’re staying plugged into what we need to know and planning for an Aug. 7 fall start. When that hits we’ll be ready. If that changes we’ll make adjustments. Until then we don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about it. We’re just getting ready for the 2020 season. We have big goals and we want to be prepared for when that hits.
Passing the time outside of work: I stay plenty busy. I have four kids. Our oldest is eight. Kinley is eight, Brynn is seven, Roman, our son, is three, and our daughter Blake is one. We’ve got our hands full all the time. We’ve been taking a lot more walks as a family. Seward’s got this beautiful trail that goes around the east side of the city. We have a trampoline in the yard. I think my girls are actually going to be better at softball than if we had the actual season. We’ve been getting to play a lot more catch. It’s been fun.