Ohio State Buckeyes head coach Ryan Day had the unenviable task of replacing three-time national champion Urban Meyer.
While Day has yet to achieve the championship heights of Meyer, he has accepted that he must do things his own way—whatever they may be. Day spoke this weak about replacing Meyer on More Than Coach Speak, a podcast hosted by Ohio State men’s basketball head coach Chris Holtmann.
“Every year you learn and you grow,” Day said. “There’s still so many things we do that we did five years ago, but there’s a lot of things that we’ve changed and had to adapt,” Day said, according to Griffin Strom of Eleven Warriors. “So you just have to be yourself. I heard that from a bunch of folks when I was named the head coach here, is like, ‘You’re not Urban Meyer, you’re not Chip Kelly, you just gotta be you.’ Now you can take the things that you’ve learned from them and put them to work every day, but as time goes on, it becomes yours more and more. So, still a lot of things in the program that are things that I learned from the coaches that I worked with before, but a lot of things we’ve had to change to adapt with the times.”
Day cited athletic director Gene Smith as a big reason for his success at Ohio State.
“I think for me, being a first-time head coach is significant. I give so much credit to Gene Smith for putting his trust in me as a first-time head coach at Ohio State,” Day said. “That’s a big job for the first time ever as a head coach. So you have an opportunity when you’re a head coach maybe at a different school to kind of learn a little bit and grow. But one of the things I did was I really attached myself to the head coach at really the last four or five stops that I had been leading up to Ohio State, because I knew I wanted to be a head coach. So I felt like I was prepared to do it.
“But what I tried to do early on was continue, because we kept so many pieces in place here between (strength coach) Mick Marotti and (general manager) Mark Pantoni, (former player development director) Ryan Stamper, the infrastructure was already here. I wanted to keep that going, because we were having success with it. But over time, it’s changed. It’s become more to my managerial style, for lack of a better time. You learn and you grow.”
Ohio State fans will certainly hope the new wisdom leads to success against the hated Michigan Wolverines this season.
