Cincinnati is changing a familiar part of its preseason routine, and this one is a pretty clean break from the past.
The Bearcats will not head to Camp Higher Ground in eastern Indiana this month, ending a stretch that had carried on for 27 seasons. Instead, preseason work will stay on campus and run through the Sheakley Indoor Practice Facility and Performance Center, where the program now has everything it needs in one place.
The university explained the move in a statement to The Enquirer: “The University of Cincinnati and UC Athletics are grateful for the 27 years of football spent at the Higher Ground Conference and Retreat Center and the relationships built with Chuck and Brenda Hail, Mark Lingle and the Church of the Nazarene. With the opening of the Sheakley Indoor Practice Facility and Performance Center, it makes competitive and operational sense to fully utilize a facility that provides everything our program needs in one location, including a state-of-the-art weight room, training room, and recovery areas," The university said in a statement to The Enquirer.
There’s also a financial piece to it. The Enquirer reported Cincinnati will save $250,000 by skipping the scheduled week-long stay.
And with the investment the program has made in its new indoor facility, the decision lines up with the way the Bearcats are built now. The IPF gives them full access to the tools they need without leaving campus, and it removes the need to practice away from all that technology and infrastructure.
It probably won’t bother the players much, either. Higher Ground was never exactly a favorite stop in recent years, according to how people around the depth chart viewed it.
While that preseason setup changes, the defense is also working through a major shift of its own. Cincinnati is installing a new 3-4 blitzing scheme under defensive coordinator Nate Woody, and head coach Scott Satterfield said last month on ESPN 1530 that the process is still taking shape.
"It's going well. I think it's slow.
When you think about spring practice, there are 15 opportunities there, and Coach Woody and the staff are learning the new players and trying to figure out what they can do and can't do," Satterfield said. "As we go through the summer, we're starting to install back over and really just kind of repeating that, and then when we get to the fall camp, we'll do the same thing, kind of start over, reinstall that as well to be able to do a lot of different things.
I think there's a lot of variety. You're going to be able to see different coverages, a lot of different blitz packages, mixing things up.
"These Big 12 quarterbacks are so talented nowadays that you just can't fit the same defense. You've got to be able to mix it up against those guys, but one thing I think that stands out defensively is we did get a lot bigger at the back end with our DBs, both corners have great length and really good size, the safeties are very impressive with what they can do with their size."
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