Ryan Day had his players read a book. The volume he selected was "Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall In Love With the Process of Becoming Great." It isn't exactly "Anna Karenina." At a modest 118 pages, it's the kind of self-improvement manual that an enterprising salesman could finish on a flight from Dallas to Cincinnati.
But its messages, told through parables delivered by a Japanese master to a young American pupil, are clear. Excellence is a slog that requires consistent, tiring work. Setbacks are part of the process. Humbly committing to improvement is its own reward.
"Everybody focuses on that final result and what it looked like and all those things," Day said recently. "We needed to get back to the beginning of the processand focusing on the process and not necessarily focusing on the result."
The team read "Chop Wood Carry Water" in the lead-up to training camp. Players read a chapter a day, with TV monitors in the football facility displaying the one currently assigned. Then the team gathered daily while a player, coach or trainer explained what the chapter meant to them.
"I think even one time we had a nutritionist," senior linebacker Sonny Styles said. "So everyone was a part of this."
Although former Lakers coach Phil Jackson was famous for assigning books to his players, in college football it isn't typical. Steve Spurrier, who won the 1966 Heisman Trophy and coached at Duke, Florida and South Carolina, said he didn't know of a coach who did it.
But it isn't completely unheard of. Iowa State coach Matt Campbell had his team read "Chop Wood" before the 2018 season. The year before, his players read "Pound The Stone: 7 Lessons to Develop Grit on the Path to Mastery."
Both were written by Joshua Medcalf, a childhood fan of Michael Jordan who grew up to play soccer at Vanderbilt and Duke. Medcalf doesn't follow football, and had no idea that Ohio State players were reading his book.
"One of the biggest challenges whenever you have won is that winning is a great deodorant," Medcalf said. "It covers up a lot of stuff but it doesn't fix it. So it's really important to, every single day, get up and chop the wood and carry the water."
Ohio State Football's Radical Offseason Workout: Reading a Book - WSJ 
