NMU football technique camp

When Chris Ostrowsky was named the head coach of the Northern Michigan football team in November of 2011, he was told that high school football players weren’t interested in playing for the Wildcats.

Flash forward twenty-one months to August of 2013.

More than 50 players from Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and even Canada showed up to the Superior Dome on Saturday to participate in the first ever Technique Exposure Camp at NMU.

“We’re really excited about just the overall vision being executed into year two,” Ostrowsky said. “This is a critical component for us. It’s a camp; it’s a skills/technique camp but a tremendous recruiting tool as well. We feel pretty good, represented in terms of the local ‘box’, if you will, and our recruiting area is represented on the field. As coaches, you work so hard to have something like this here, and I think it puts us on a different level for sure.”

The camp gave Ostrowsky and his staff the opportunity to not just coach the players, but to get to know each one of them on a more personal level. That could sway a potential recruit to choose NMU in the future.

“That’s priceless. That’s really the advantage of having this kind of event here at Northern, on our campus, in the dome,” Ostrowsky said. “They’re competing. That’s what you want to see, mostly. They’re competing and they’re taking to the coaching, and I think when those two things happen, and you’ve got a pretty good talent base, you have a special player.”

Ostrowsky and his staff ran the players thru the same drills that the Wildcats participate in on a daily basis.

Even though this was the first camp of its kind at Northern, Ostrowsky sees the correlation between the camp and wins on the football field.

“Everything we do is just going to grow, so you’ve got 50 here; you’re going to have 70 next year,” Ostrowsky said. “Along with that will come more wins and a filled dome to see a great product, and that’s kind of what we hoped for when we initially went to work here within this program. I think we’re a whole lot closer today than we were a year and a half ago.”