Cougars credit Sacajawea camp for unity
PULLMAN – When the Washington State football team beat Utah on Saturday to become bowl eligible for the first time in seven years, many players and coaches wore T-shirts that said “Property of Sacajawea Junior High.”
The phrase was an homage to the Lewiston, Idaho, site of the Cougars’ fall camp, where they spent the month of August training for the season away from the WSU campus.
The players and coaches believe the experience was beneficial, and that wearing the shirts can serve as a reminder to draw upon the learning experiences that took place.
“All you saw was your teammates,” safety Deone Bucannon said. “You don’t see students on campus, you can’t just go anywhere. It’s football; you hang out with your teammates, and then you go to sleep. It’s over and over and that creates a camaraderie; it’s more of a family and a bond that’s created in that kind of environment and I think that really helped us this year.”
In camp, players were assigned roommates with the intention of getting them to spend time with their teammates who were least like them. Offensive players with defensive players. Seniors with freshmen.
Coach Mike Leach said the roommate pairings were not inspired out of any concern for, or sense of, cliques developing on the team. Rather, he said, it was an attempt to accelerate cohesion amongst a group of young, unacquainted players.
“We had a lot of awfully young players and people that didn’t know one another. And then naturally, in the course of practice, there are positions that don’t see much of one another,” Leach said. “Your offensive lineman doesn’t see much of the starting corner for example, or your starting wide receiver doesn’t see much of, maybe, a defensive tackle, that type of thing.”
Bucannon – a senior defensive back – was paired with freshman receiver River Cracraft and acknowledged that the experience led him to develop bonds with teammates he might not have otherwise had occasion to meet.
“Whoever your roommate was, was the opposite of you,” Bucannon said. “It was a (defensive) lineman and an (offensive) lineman. Just the person that’s your opposite on the field …”