FOOTBALL ACROSS MINNESOTA | Week 9
Noah Bresson is a college senior, so his daily routine might as well be chiseled in stone. Awake at 5:15 a.m., in bed by 10 p.m.
Actually, that sounds more like a baker’s schedule than a college student’s.
“Once you get used to it, it’s not as bad,” Bresson said. “It’s a little bit of a sacrifice in your social life. You can’t stay up late hanging out with your buddies. You’ve got to go to bed or else you’re going to suffer the next day.”
In the predawn darkness in St. Paul most mornings, Bresson and his Macalester teammates are banging their pads and running routes while the rest of campus sleeps. The first whistle of practice blows at 6:15 a.m., so players arrive around 5:45 a.m. to get ready for the grind.
“Sometimes when that alarm goes off, you’re still like, what the heck are we doing?” Macalester coach Phil Nicolaides said, laughing. “I’m driving to work and [saying], ‘What we were thinking getting up this early?’ But then at 8 a.m., you’re like, this is the best.”
This was his idea.

Hired in 2022, Nicolaides found that his team had to share Macalester’s single turf field every afternoon with the men’s and women’s soccer teams. The football team often moved to a grass field to alleviate the logjam, but that setup was not as beneficial for teaching offensive and defensive concepts.