“By the time he put the pads on for the first time in grade school, his coaches often forced him and his teammates to do hundreds of up-downs and sprints, and practices would include ‘bull in the ring.’ The drill would require one player to stand in the middle of the field, with teammates surrounding him. Then the coach would call one of their numbers and send them sprinting from any direction to tackle him. Today, the drill probably would get a coach fired.” (I did all the drills in this paragraph, and I still didn’t end up being all that tough.) WaPo: Tough love or verbal abuse? The new lines in coaching are hard to define.