Every Friday during the fall football season, the offensive linemen for the Quincy University football team have started a new tradition to not only get their bodies ready for game day but also bring their position group closer together. This new ritual for the players is a forty-five-minute yoga session. This class started to get the players loose before game day but has become so much more.

With the new Hawks coaching staff setting a new standard on the field, the veteran football players are setting a new standard off of it. Nathan Smith, senior leader and left tackle on the Hawks front line, was initially interested in attending the yoga session but took the chance when another teammate offered to take him.

“Yoga on Fridays started with my teammate, Lucas Sartori; he also plays on the o-line and invited me to a yoga session at the HFC just to break up the lactic acid and prepare for the game on Saturday,” Smith said.

These warriors on the field use this time in the yoga studio to stretch and prepare for game day, but these players have also found other benefits to the sessions. One benefit is the ability to grow closer as teammates, create something special with this new team mindset, and drive to do something great.

Sartori, a junior offensive tackle, takes these classes to become closer to his younger teammates and keep the football team’s success trending upward.

“They are looking at it as a way to build a relationship with the older guys and be a part of something special. We are on the up, and these guys who are bought in and going to yoga want to be a part of something special,” Sartori said.

The benefits of yoga to this group of men are the ability to move quicker with a looser lower body and create more mobility for the player’s hips. This allows the lineman to move faster on the front line, decreasing cramping and straining injuries on the field. Not only with those benefits with the on-field production, Oscar Poyser, a freshman offensive tackle, says these sessions bring him closer to his teammates.

“I feel like it is pretty good. A few of us get together beforehand, and we walk up there and stuff like that; it is lovely and benefits the team with bonding and morale,” Poyser said.

This small tradition off the field has turned into production on it. The Hawks had a 2024 record of six wins and four losses and are chasing two significant goals. This is the first time a back-to-back winning season has happened since the early 2010s, and the second team is to accomplish five victories in conference play, which has only happened once before. These men are trying to achieve something that has only happened a few times before, and they believe that the best way to pave the way to a new regime is to start with something small, like a forty-five-minute yoga class on Fridays.