In the midst of Ball State football's second-longest losing streak this decade, head coach Pete Lembo continues to look for answers, starting with the team's leaders.
One solution Lembo is looking for comes from his players, specifically the leaders that will need to step up at this pivotal of a point in the season.
“Our players need to take a little bit more ownership of that part of it,” Lembo said. “Because sometimes what they hear from their peers is even more important than what they hear from me or somebody on the staff.”
Lembo is talking about the team’s leaders, such as the weekly captains and the seniors that leads the young Cardinal team on both sides of the ball.
Lembo relies on those leaders because they are the ones who are more likely to see any of the 44 underclassmen outside of football related activities.
“Not everybody is gonna get that message as easily as others,” Lembo said. “You count on those leaders to be the guys that are reiterating that stuff when they go back to their apartment, when they go back to the dorm, when they see their buddies in class, when they go have dinner together at training table and those kind of things.”
This year’s team is relatively young. For some of those players, it might take more than one time for the coaches’ messages to get through to them, unlike some of the fifth-year seniors who have been on the team since Lembo’s first season in Muncie.
Lembo understands that his seniors will retain the message better because they have been learning the coaching styles for a few more years.
“If I say something once to Jake Richard, I think we all know at this point he’s gonna get it,” Lembo said. “He’s not gonna have to hear that message three, four, five times."
This is what makes the leaders so important for those younger players on the team. There are only a certain number of coaches on the field, and even less time where they are all together on an average week.
There are five games left and Ball State will try to avoid a fifth straight loss, something that has only happened one other time in the Lembo era (2014).
Focus and maturity are some of the things Lembo will look to become sharper with the limited time left in the season.
“Everybody learns differently [and] understands differently, and sometimes guys need to hear it more and more ... to understand it,” Lembo said. “I try to be consistent, but our time is limited.”
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