Lafayette Fighting Irish football preview: Culture being built in Year 2 of Nate Daugherty
By Calvin Silvers
Lafayette head football coach Nate Daugherty enters his second year with the Fighting Irish, looking to take what he learned in year one and improve from last year’s 1-9 season. The team has a rich history, recently having had multiple winning teams throughout the 2010s.
However, the start of this decade wasn’t as kind, with the team going 1-19 combined the past two seasons, but Daugherty went to work in the offseason to build a better culture.
“It was just kind of like throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it stuck last year at that point,” Daugherty said. “This year we went back to the drawing boards, a lot of leadership program stuff with our kids, taught them how to be good teammates and how to be a good brother.”
Culture and leadership were two keywords repeated throughout the practice, as the team wants to build a base of success that can carry when their time is done. So far, this addition of a leadership program has fed into the pushing and challenging each other positively.
“Our cultural change, we’re all brothers here, we’re all family,” lineman JaVonte Simms said. “We’re doing boards together, competing against each other. We’re having fun, enjoying each other, picking each other up, stuff like that.”
Looking at this year’s squad, the Fighting Irish return just a handful of starters, but roughly six athletes on offense and eight on defense have at least some form of varsity action. Because of this, the team knew the youngsters would need to be relied on in the upcoming years.
“We had a huge senior class last year and towards the end of the year when we were losing more and more, I started kind of working the young guys in a little bit more and just kind of looking forward to the future,” Daugherty said.
One position that doesn’t lack experience is running back, as the team fields two seniors.
One of those running backs, Tate Crabb, is expecting to carry the rock more this year, and luckily he has the Simms brother blocking for him.
“We’ve got Tate Crabb and Elias Chapin, those guys are built like power rangers,” Daugherty said. “They’re just buff and chiseled and whatever, but they’ll be a good two-headed monster back there in the backfield.”
As the season approaches next Friday against Center, the team is ready to feast and hopefully can fill their hunger with wins.
“How bad we want it, I mean, I don’t think everybody else is used to winning. It’s something different for us,” Crabb said. “We’re going to fight for that, however hard we have to, we’re going to go get that.”
