Previously:Jim Harbaugh, Kyle Kalis, Brian Cole
[Eric Upchurch/MGoBlog]
While I was looking for someone to talk to one-on-one yesterday, our photographer Eric Upchurch said redshirt freshman tight end Chase Winovich, who moved from outside linebacker this spring, seemed like a great interview. He was not wrong.
How is the transition from defense to offense going for you?
At first I wasn’t sure how to think about it, and just a little hesitant. I feel like, as most people are, going to a position that you’ve never played before and weren’t recruited as going through the recruiting process—it goes through your mind, here’s what you’re going to be, and then to go through a season playing [linebacker], you’re just having a blast with it, going up and hitting people and just playing physical and the chase. I always joked, I said, “they named me Chase, they didn’t name me Block or something else.”
But as the time went on I grew to really start liking it. The practices were more fun, [I was] more engaged, more versatile, you could take mental reps a lot, it was easier to see how people break, especially Jake Butt, and just go about their business, and I started to love it. So going into camp, I’ve never been this excited to go into a camp in my entire life.
With Coach Harbaugh and his styles of camps and his history with Stanford and San Diego and San Francisco, it’s going to be a battle, man. I want to be in the trenches or in the Apache helicopter this camp, you know, shooting the machine guns. That's how I view it. Every day is going to be a grind and if I can maximize the transition from summer to camp and linebacker to tight end and have those coincide, I think the days are going to go by great.
[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the interview.]
You mentioned watching Jake Butt run reps in practice. How much have your teammates helped you get comfortable at the position?
I think my teammates, especially the offense as a whole, they helped me and they were pretty understanding. The coaches really were understanding and tried to help me as best they could. Jake Butt helped a lot, just the way he practices with his routes and the way he knows the offense, it’s inspirational. That’s just as good as him talking to me is his inspiration to me. That part alone is great. I’m excited to go into camp where I can actually learn from him, you know? To learn what he does to be so successful. Because if you look at his speed and stuff, he’s good, but I think it’s more his technique is so good, it’s impressive.
Players are talking about four-hour long practices in the spring. What’s been the biggest difference in terms on intensity from Hoke to Harbaugh and what does it take to get accustomed to practicing that hard?
To me, in winter conditioning I tried to be first every single time, because I knew we were in store for something. I tried to do the same thing in the summer and try to prepare the best I can. You can’t really prepare for it, so when you show up you’ve got to know you gave everything you got. That’s really it.
For the practices themselves, the length is actually to our advantage. At first I think a lot of players viewed it as a negative thing, as a form of punishment for the way we played last season. A lot of players started to realize these practices really aren’t that terrible, per se. I mean, they’re long, they’re hard, but they’re actually to our advantage, and as time went on you started to be prepared of those types of practices. It made the spring game so easy. It went by in a flash. We were like, “that’s it?” After going through all those practices it was just amazing how quick it went by.
It sounds like Harbaugh isn’t necessarily letting you guys know the schedule ahead of time. What do you think that’s bringing to the team?
My brother-in-law pointed this out to me after he read an article talking about the unexpected stuff, he didn’t say this was in the article but he raised a really good point, he said, and it’s so true, Coach Harbaugh wants the players to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s a feeling we could really use, the feeling of being uncomfortable. That feeling will carry on when we’re in a tight game, we’re away on the road against a ranked opponent. It’s going to help us.
Being uncomfortable is something that you have to train like a lot of other skills. The unpredictability, us not being able to plan our attack, when we’re going to work out, what we’re going to be doing, I think in the long run it’ll play to our advantage.
What’s the biggest thing for you personally and for the team that you’re looking to accomplish this fall camp?
I sat down with my brother-in-law and we made a list of goals for football camp and I’m not going to go too much into those. I want to better myself every day and be the best freshman tight end that I can be. Not only do I want to make myself better but I want to make the teammates around me better, like I know they will to me.
If all of us can compete and build each other up and we can keep stacking those bricks, by the end of camp and the rest of the season we’re going to have ourselves one heck of a fortress, man. We’re going to be a force to be reckoned with. That’s the plan, at least. That’s the plan of attack.