Morgan State’s football program is off to its best start since 2009.
Head coach Damon Wilson, who has been at Morgan State for five seasons, said the key to the team’s success has been building a group that feels more like a family.
Defensive lineman Jordan Jeudy started his college career at Morgan at the same time as Wilson.
“That’s what makes it the most exciting,” Jeudy said. “Knowing that I’ve been here through it all.”
The Bears are up to a 5-2 start this season and beat Towson University for the first time in 17 years. The team also sits atop the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and made its first appearance in the FCS Top 25 last week.
Wilson attributes the team’s success to a family-first mentality.
“We want to show we care about each other and then we can actually get into the football piece of it,” Wilson told WBAL-TV 11 Sports. “It’s a lot easier to have young men buy into your system schematically once they know you care about them.”
The Bears have 56 new players this season, including starting quarterback Cameron Edge.
“If you were around us every day you wouldn’t be able to tell that we were new to each other by any means,” Cameron said. “Really, just a great job by the coaching staff to tell us what the standards are, and what we need to do each and every day to become a better team.”
The team’s record reflects a culture built around winning, but Wilson said he is especially proud of how the team responds to a loss.
“I tell the guy you gotta hate losing more than you like winning. That’s something that they understand, they’re buying into that, and we don’t want to have that feeling again, so we gotta do what we need to do,” Wilson said.
Inside the locker room, players are buying into Wilson’s mentality.
“That’s something that as a competitor you get tired of…you learn a lot of things in losses. If you don’t learn a lesson, it’s truly a loss,” Cameron added. “If you learn it, it’s only a help from there.”
The Bears have learned tough lessons over the past few seasons.
For the fifth-year defensive lineman, being part of the group that brought the program back to prominence has been a worthwhile wait.
“We’ve been here, we’ve seen a lot of different groups,” Jeudy reflected. “But I’ll remember this one as the one that made history. We will forever make history.”
READ MORE:Morgan State football thrives with family-first push
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