The story officially gets underway on March 6, 2021. That's when Kansas State football head coach Chris Klieman, and Collin Klein, the quarterbacks coach-turned-offensive coordinator, ask Avery Johnson, a native of Maize, Kansas, and the top dual-threat quarterback in the Class of 2023, to drive two hours northeast and become a Wildcat.
Two days. That's all that remains for Kansas State's first spring football practice season of the Collin Klein era. It's been a mini-marathon, 15-workout season that officially began on March 26 and will conclude on Saturday. There's still so much to do — "We have a long way to go to be the football team we want to be this fall," Klein says — before the season opener against Nicholls on September 5 at a sold-out Bill Snyder Family Stadium, but each meeting at the Vanier Family Football Complex and each practice script and each block and each tackle inside the Shamrock Indoor Practice Facility screams consistency and improvement along with a brand of energy that although impressive still needs improvement in the eyes of Klein, the 36-year-old first-year head coach, who once wore blood on both elbows like a badge of honor for the Wildcats, and who now labors, directs and manages in a polo shirt and sun visor, watching the players go to work on the football field.
Third-year Kansas State women's golf head coach Stew Burke is excited and curious. Coming off one of the best seasons in the program history and featuring two of the more talented women's golfers in the nation, Burke entered this year with his youngest team at K-State — a squad that didn't necessarily possess a true No. 1 leader, but that was drenched in potential.
One of four Kansas State football players to run 23 miles-per-hour prior to the 2025 season, junior cornerback Donovan McIntosh has added a little size to his 6-foot-3 frame and has increased his weight from 187 pounds to 195 pounds over winter conditioning — a product, he says, of the intense weight training regimen instituted by new Director of Strength and Conditioning Jeremy Jacobs and his staff.
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