Dear Citadel Football Association Members:
First and foremost, I want to thank you, the CFA. You continue to be our loyal supporters, and I thank you very much for supporting our program.
We are back for another season of Bulldog football. Looking back on the 2023 season, it wasn’t all bad. Just most of it. That’s the truth and I always promise to tell you the truth. However, 2023 did have some good things. We, as a program, don’t look at mistakes as mistakes. If we learn from it, if we never do it again, then those aren’t mistakes. Those are lessons learned. And we had a lot of lessons learned going into 2024. In 2023, we played 29 young men who either didn’t start or didn’t play high school football. Those 29 young men are still with us today, and they have made gains by leaps and bounds. Also in 2023, by week seven, we either started or saw significant playing time out of sixteen true freshmen. This is exciting for us as a staff, because those young men were able to gain in-game experience.
Fast forward to 2024, we had a winter workout plan that was gruesome. It was not for the faint of heart. We worked out four days a week at 5:40am doing football specific drills. Then we brought our young men back in the afternoon for weight training sessions. The guys who completed this program saw drastic differences in their bodies. Not only from the workouts, but from the education on nutrition that we poured into them. On Wednesdays, days that we didn’t have workouts, we brought our young men into the facility in the afternoon for what we call “Bulldog Bonding”. With these sessions, we taught our young men the necessities of life like how to change a tire, write checks, or tie a tie. From winter workouts and these sessions, we rolled into Spring Practice. In those fifteen spring practices we focused on the “how” and the “why”. We focused on the process. We are very excited about what we saw in those practices, especially the young guys who emerged and the 29 players I mentioned before develop into player who will play for us again, but with a different confidence. As we moved into the summer, we had 73 young men who took it upon themselves to stay in Charleston. On top of our summer workout regimen, these 73 young men had to work summer jobs to pay for their housing and meals. The final leg of our off-season workouts was fall camp. And our fall camp was all about Mindset. A lot of what we talked about and did during fall camp was not just to coach the body, but also the mind as well.
Which brings us to today. We are very excited about this season and very excited to face this first opponent in Charleston Southern.
Sincerely,
Maurice T. Drayton
Head Coach