Coach Tucker seeks “character, unselfishness, teamwork, discipline, and maturity” from Spartan Football student-athletes

<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Coach_mtucker">Tucker</a> recalls the challenges of being hired on February 12, 2020 and then shutting down the program a few weeks later due to the pandemic.</p><p>“I was just in the final stages of assembling the staff and had just put the strength coach in place and got everyone under contract,” Tucker tells Beekman. “We were actually going to start spring ball the following Tuesday. I was going to make a trip down to Indianapolis for the Big Ten basketball tournament, and I got word that they weren't going to have fans. And then a couple hours later, I got word the team was headed back to East Lansing. And at that point, that's when my world had changed forever.</p><p>“Our staff did a great job adapting quickly to the situation. I sent everyone home and said that we're going to be working from home for a while so get with the IT guys to get packed up and get your laptops and whatever you need to work from home. Then we started talking to our academic folks about what our players were going to do and they started mentioning something called Zoom. They said that the professors on campus were using Zoom and they recommended that we do the same. And so, we're all saying, ‘What the heck is Zoom? I've never heard of that.’</p><p>“So our first challenge was to figure out how to use Zoom to communicate with our players and have team meetings, have unit meetings, individual meetings, figuring out how to put a background on the Zoom, Zoom etiquette, lighting, auto mute, all of those deals, and it was fun. We recognized right away that that was going to be our most daunting challenge. How do we connect with our players when we're a new staff? All the players have been sent back to their permanent homes and they don't know us and we don't know them. Take out the X’s and O's, just to introduce ourselves and just get to know each other as people was done completely over Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls and text.</p><p>“And then we needed to install our playbook on defense and speci