Catching up with Tony Reno

With a little bit of a break in my schedule, I was able to sit down with Yale head coach Tony Reno for the first time since the press conference announcing him as the 34th coach in Yale football history. Many of the highlights from the interview are available in this video.

With tomorrow being the one-month anniversary of his official appointment, it seemed to be the perfect time to run a story documenting what it's been like for Reno since getting hired. While I don't intend on rehashing everything that's going to be in the story (since that would defeat the purpose of filing a story), there's some other info that didn't make it into the piece that I can share with you.

First of all, Reno said he has been thrilled with the attitude of the returning players and couldn't say enough good things about the leadership being shown by team captain Will McHale.

Reno said that Yale will line up defensively in a 3-4. The move makes sense since other than Chris Dooley, Yale is left with a lot of unproven players at defensive tackle while the return of McHale, Wes Moyer (who is coming back for a fifth season of eligibility), Brian Leffler, Will Vaughn and Ruan Falbo gives the Bulldogs plenty of options at linebacker.

With three players back who started at offensive tackle (Roy Collins, Wes Gavin and Ben Carbery) and the loss of both starting guards, Reno did not rule out the possibility to moving one of the tackles inside.

The coaching staff is pretty much in place but is not being officially announcement until later this week, according to Reno. Rick Flanders is the only holdover among the assistant coaches and is moving back to being defensive coordinator. Reno also hired Kris Barber, Joe Conlin and Dwayne Wilmot off the Harvard staff he was a part of for the last three years. He addressed the talk that Murphy was a little perturbed with Reno snaring three assistants but Reno said his relationship with Murphy continues to be a good one. Multiple sources have confirmed to me that Larry Ciotti is expected to return to the role of running backs coach he held under Jack Siedlecki.

Finally, spring camp begins on Mar. 28 with the spring game being held on Apr. 21. One change from the Williams' tenure is that the Blue-White game will be exactly that - a game. Williams looked at it as a glorified practice while Reno said the plan will be to have the No. 1 offense and No. 2 defense on one squad and No. 1 defense and No. 2 offense on the other and let the teams go at it.