How a year away from football brought Luke Day and Chip Morton to South Carolina
The aromas of afternoon coffees and toasted sandwiches coat the air of the Panera on Deerfield Boulevard in Mason, Ohio. The alchemic sounds of baristas churning together ingredients for a Chai tea latte couple with the beeping of credit cards being removed from the card reader at the register.
Off to the side of the cashier, Luke Day and Chip Morton sit face-to-face in a self-constructed, metaphoric bubble. It’s the “slow” time of the afternoon, where foot traffic is kept to a minimum and the circle of thought and devout conversation at work won’t be disturbed.
“Man-to-man, it’s difficult to do,” Morton said of opening up emotionally. “We just don’t do that. We don’t speak that language to each other often enough. And when you find it, you want to hold on to it and continue to grow it.”
Morton has spent more than 30 years patrolling football fields and weight rooms around the country. Spells at Ohio State and Penn State — where he worked under Joe Paterno — formed the earliest days of his time training football players. He later added stops with the San Diego Chargers, Carolina Panthers, Baltimore Ravens, Washington Football Team and Cincinnati Bengals. His 2000 Super Bowl ring, courtesy of the Ravens, is further proof of a career well-spent.
Day has followed a more collegiate path. After ending his playing career at Morehead State, he transferred to Miami (Ohio) where he worked as a weight room intern. Jobs at Cincinnati, South Florida, Central Florida and Marshall followed. As did a one-year overlap with Morton and the Bengals.
But for two men whose resumes are built on encouraging and shaping athletes, their near-daily afternoon discussions at this chain bakery not far from the NFL offices that employed them prior to 2019 weren’t business meetings. They were a means of coping.
Behind Day’s persistent energy and Morton’s million-dollar smile is a shared struggle not so far gone. Amid a 2019 season away from football, teacher and student sought one another out.
Together, Day and Morton found a reinvigorated purpose in a profession that only months earlier cast them off and has since landed them in Columbia as strength coaches on Shane Beamer’s first staff at South Carolina.
“There were some low times, some low moments, some opportunities that did not come to fruition,” Morton explained. “But now I’m literally walking around the practice field at the (Long Family Football Operations Center) with no shoes on, a beautiful grass field, talking to you about what a glorious day this is and that’s kind of where I’m at right now with it.”
‘I think that’s what friends do’
Day had stepped away from football once before, leaving strength and conditioning to pursue ministry at the end of the 2014 season. That lasted less than a year, when the NFL came calling.
He landed back in the business for the 2015 season when a spot working under Morton with the Bengals opened through an internship with Ignition Athletic Performance Group — an elite training center based in Cincinnati that helped train Bengals players. After just a week back on the job, he was reinvigorated.
“It was just like, ‘Yeah this is it. This is what I’m supposed to be doing,’ ” Day said. “... It was a real strong reminder that this is what I want to be doing.”
One year with the Bengals came and went. Two years working under Doc Holliday at Marshall followed. So too did an ill-fated trip to Colorado — where he was slated to work as a strength coach for the Buffaloes. It all eventually sent him back to Cincinnati and amid the varying java drinks and baked goods at the Panera in Mason.
“That was a horrible situation,” Day said of his one-month stint in Boulder, careful not to reveal too much, “and I left in a very short amount of time.”
Morton had worked in football from 1985 until the end of the 2018 season — including 27 years at the NFL level. But after 16 years with the Bengals and the firing of head coach Marvin Lewis, he was relieved of his duties.
For the first time in more than three decades, Morton, like Day, was job hunting.
“I knew that they were talking almost every day, making sure each other was OK and checking on the well-being of each other,” said Clif Marshall, a longtime colleague of Morton and Day and Indiana men’s basketball’s director of athletic performance. “I think that’s what friends do.”
Construction work and a year away from football
Day stands just to the right of the sand pit positioned at the back portion of South Carolina’s practice fields amid a slew of sweaty, panting Gamecock receivers. His booming voice carries over the football complex as players run through the sand, while his jet black hair and six-inch beard glisten in the midsummer sun.
“Let’s move, let’s move, let’s move,” Day yells, coaxing the Gamecocks over and around varying objects placed in their path through the make-shift beach.
Day has always been a boisterous personality, perfectly befitting of a man tasked with squeezing every ounce of effort from a football team in the process of a wholesale change in attitude.
He was loud and rambunctious as a kid. But there was an even-keeled temperament to Day in his youth. He was equal parts madman and moral barometer.
“He loved to have a good time, loved to be loud and run around, stuff like that,” said Scott Kellums, Day’s childhood best friend. “But he was always the guy — even at our young age — that you can set your moral compass to and know that if you’re following what he’s got going on, you’re probably not going down the wrong path.”
It’s rare more than a few days pass without Kellums and Day communicating. It comes with the territory of having been friends since meeting at a seventh grade football practice at Garfield Middle School in Hamilton, Ohio. So when Day departed Colorado and headed back to the Cincinnati area without any prospects, Kellums put in a call to his uncle, the owner of a local construction company. Before he could finish explaining Day’s situation, his uncle suggested they hire him onto one of their crews.
Laying concrete, Kellums explains, is simple: You’re picking heavy things up, and putting them in a different location.
“It’s kind of like a weight room,” he said.
Day would spend his year away from football laying concrete on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base just outside Dayton, Ohio.
Gone were the glitz and glam that come with working in Division I football. Instead, it was replaced with hot summer days moving concrete amid a crew of men, aside from Kellums, Day had no previous relations.
“It was almost like junior high when you don’t want to do conditioning and you hope you sprained your ankle,” Day said only half-joking. “It’s like I was hoping my tire would just blow up right now so I wouldn’t have to go.”
Training Marines and a sense of perspective
Stuart Morton never talked about his World War II exploits. There was no discussion of his Purple Heart. No briefing on his tours of duty in the Philippines or Korea ever occurred. From his discharge until his death in 2009, it remained a mystery.
“I remember as he got older, before he passed, being like ‘Dad you’ve got all these medals can you give me the history?’ ” Chip Morton recounted, “and he really didn’t want to talk about it.”
Technically still under contract with the Bengals after his firing, Morton continued to receive pay from the organization contingent on him not taking another football job for a spell.
Volunteer coaching at local high schools filled his time. As did a stint working with Marines and the new levels of perspective that came with it.
“Those men and women, they’re the real deal,” Morton said. “It was almost embarrassing to be a civilian in a way. I felt that I was very humbled.”
Each day spent with the Marines — a number of whom were on the path to becoming special forces operatives — brought subtle reminders of Morton’s father.
After he returned from World War II, Stuart was asked by a wartime buddy to work for him in insurance in Connecticut. In an alternate universe, Chip said his father would’ve been a history teacher. But having been married and needing work, Stuart took his friend up on his offer. He’d work that insurance job for 35 years.
“My dad was a grinder,” Chip said. “He supported us and worked his tail off, but his message to me was to do something that I love.”
Interviewing with South Carolina
Armed with a 44-page outline and his normally effervescent personality, Day regaled South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer with his vision for the program.
Beamer and Day’s call lasted an hour-and-a-half. It took Beamer 10 minutes to decide Day was his man.
“I spoke to a lot of strength coaches as I put this staff together,” Beamer said in January. “I could never put my finger on that person who I was looking for. ... I spent 90 minutes on the phone with him and after 10 minutes I was convinced this was the guy we needed to hire.”
Day came to South Carolina with a palpable energy — so much so he hopped in his car and headed to Columbia from West Virginia before his contract was even approved by the university. But there was an added bonus: if Day was hired, Morton was part of the package.
In their months away from football, Day and Morton shared plenty. There were dark days and light. Both readily admit they contemplated whether their coaching careers were over. But for what dismal hours and difficult discussions played out over a plastic table at a Panera in southwest Ohio, each wanted the other to succeed. If one found employment, the other would join them.
“(Day) got the job and he was like ‘Are you coming? Can you be here Sunday’” Morton recounted through a laugh. “... So this all happened really fast.”
Almost one year to the day that Day left Marshall for Colorado, Holliday hired him back. Day would spend the 2020 season with the Thundering Herd, helping them to a 7-3 record amid the COVID-19-shortened campaign, before he landed at South Carolina.
“He would talk to the team as much as I did, because I would trust him,” Holliday told The State “He always had the right answers. I leaned on him a lot.”
Morton trained Marines from September 2020 until January 2021, when Day coaxed him into joining him in Columbia.
“It’s just a match made in heaven,” Clif Marshall said. “In my opinion — not just because I worked with them — I truly believe they are two of the best in the business.”
A return to football in Columbia
Morton slips out of his South Carolina-issued Under Armour shoes and begins to pace.
It’s early June in Columbia. The hellish temperatures of South Carolina summer haven’t quite grasped their iron-tight hold on the area, but heat waves begin to form along the turf.
Morton clutches a cell phone in one hand, while he completes an hour-and-17 minute shoeless sojourn around the outdoor practice fields outside the Jerri and Steve Spurrier Indoor Practice Facility.
“We love the area,” he said, referring to his wife and seven children in his normally-cheery tone. “It’s beautiful down here.”
Not 48 hours before Morton’s saunter, Day made his own trek around the exterior of the Gamecocks’ practice surface.
With each step came various strength and conditioning jargon and philosophies. Day delved into the intricacies of developing a new strength and conditioning program. He explained how each movement of the body comes with a purpose behind it.
Like a potion master, Day mixes together a concoction of exercises, ideas and themes that’ve been passed down from Morton and other influential figures over the past decade to develop a program best-suited for South Carolina’s football players.
“I feel like I’m cheating having Chip with me every day,” Day said. “Chip is my mentor, but now he’s with me and working in this program with me.”
There’s a level of poeticism in Day and Morton’s parallel paths. The pair exited football together, concerned they may never land back into the unforgiving and insular culture around it. Now they work next to one another in hopes of progressing a football program in need of a lift.
Should either man need a brief respite from the varying stresses Southeastern Conference football puts on coaches, though, there’s a pair of Paneras within driving distance of the Gamecock football offices.
This story was originally published June 30, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
