It was 8:26 on Saturday morning when a familiar face exited the locker room at Finley Stadium wearing a slightly unfamiliar outfit.
"I like it from this side of it," said a smiling Jacob Huesman, the former University of Tennessee at Chattanooga quarterback who returned to the football program this year wearing the garb of a tight ends coach, when asked about the relatively early morning practice.
On the other hand, given the amount of time he must now put in as an assistant to first-year head coach Rusty Wright, Huesman also admitted, "I don't have a clue what day it is."
It will be like this for the next three weeks in every community where college football is played. It's preseason camp. It's all football, all of the time. There might even be a couple of two-a-days thrown in. There certainly will be lots of meetings and film studies and conditioning. Especially conditioning, most of it carried out in heat and humidity mirroring a sauna.
"We ran 'em around the field a few times yesterday," Huesman said of Friday's final drill. "It's good for 'em."
Huesman's role in that conditioning exercise?
"I stood in the end zone and told them, 'Run around me.' I never moved. Wasn't a bad deal."
Said Wright: "We're going to practice a certain way. We shouldn't run if we practice the right way. We ran for 15 minutes."
The former Mocs assistant is less than a week into his first preseason camp running the show. He was up at 5:15, took his vitamins, downed half a Mountain Dew and was in his office by 6 a.m. Asked what has changed from two decades worth of assistant coaching at several locales, Wright replied, "Over the last few days I've been a travel agent, meteorologist, groundskeeper and janitor. In the past, those issues were always someone else's problem."
But the forced renovation of Scrappy Moore (practice) Field following last spring's flooding, unexpectedly strong thunderstorms during the times last week's practices were originally scheduled and delays in athletic apparel company Adidas shipping this season's practice shorts have forced Wright to improvise on almost every front.
"It keeps you young," Wright said. "It makes you move."
UTC assistant athletic director Mike Royster was a young man when he first came to the school in the 1970s. He's now been there so long that he can't remember if this is his "45th or 46th fall camp."
But he vividly remembers working for former New York Giants great Joe Morrison when JoMo coached the Mocs from 1973 to 1979.
"When I first started with Coach Morrison we didn't have a weightroom," Royster recalled. "We didn't have a weight machine. You'd collect the pads and gear after the final game, and you wouldn't see those guys again until the start of spring practice. It's a lot different now."
Joining Royster in the Finley end zone on Saturday morning was Troy Boeck, who was the 1990 Southern Conference defensive player of the year for the Mocs, and whose son Ty is a sophomore linebacker on this year's team.
"We had two or three practices a day this time of year," Troy remembered. "They don't do that anymore."
They also don't sign a lot of 225-pound kids to play on the defensive line, which is what he weighed when he first showed up in 1987 from Evans, Georgia.
"I put up an Iron Maiden poster over my bed - and I never listened to Iron Maiden - because I wanted my teammates to know how tough I was," Boeck said of the heavy metal band. "They'd walk in and say, 'Iron Maiden, huh?' and I'd say (his voice deepening) 'Yeah.'"
But by the time he graduated he'd put on 15-20 pounds and become an all-star, and he later was inducted into UTC's Hall of Fame. So while Boeck insisted he never listened to Iron Maiden's work, it should be noted that one of their best-loved songs was the 1980 number "Burning Ambition."
Of course, ambition without a clear plan to get where you want to go often will get you nowhere.
"They're willing to work," Wright said of these Mocs. But he also quickly added, "They just don't know how to work. There comes a point when you have to fight through things, and we're not there yet."
It's an oft-repeated lament this time of year. NFL guys say it. Alabama's Nick Saban says it. High school coaches say it. Some of them even mean it.
But that burning ambition to be the best never has left Wright or staffers such as Huesman, who is certainly putting in the hours to make his coaching career mirror his UTC playing career, when the quarterback became a three-time SoCon offensive player of the year.
Recalling how his wife, Hannah, arrived home from out of town Friday night, Huesman said, "I saw her from 9:30 to 9:45, when I went to bed."
No one knows how any of this will play out when the Mocs open the season 25 days from today at Finley against Eastern Illinois. But the morning practices are going to remain for the rest of the season for the best of reasons.
"After 10 a.m., they're going to be college students," Wright said. "Which is what they should be."
If only more coaches had a burning ambition to put their players' education first.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.