FOXBOROUGH – During Saturday’s second day of the annual MHSFCA Coaches Clinic at Gillette Stadium, new Yale head coach Kevin Cahill was the keynote speaker during lunch.

Cahill had a whirlwind week, going from being the head coach of nationally-ranked Lehigh to returning to Yale and replacing Tony Reno at a school he coached at for a decade.

No one is Tony Reno and he’s irreplaceable. But, Cahill was able to lead Lehigh to back-to-back Patriot League titles and a 12-0 regular season record (along with a Top 3 ranking at one point) during the 2025 campaign.

Cahill isn’t taking over a putrid program like he did there, in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Still, he knows he’s got to make his own mark when taking over the Bulldogs. If fans were wondering what that may look like, during his 31-minute speech, Cahill told a great story about something he did with the Mountain Hawks called The Sunrise Special.

Here’s an excerpt about the event or, challenge, if you will. One thing you need to keep in mind here is that the entire roster is split into eight ‘teams’ at this point. You also need to remember that there is a pretty significantly sized ‘mountain’ dividing the ‘athletic’ side of campus and the ‘academic’ side of campus…

“The Friday before spring break. This Friday before spring break, we’ll do something as a team and challenge them. Last year, a year ago, our Sunrise Special was pretty cool…our eight teams, we walked in and said ‘hey, you guys…first group, come with me. We run them outside, we gave them four bandanas and said ‘here’s your four core values.’ These four core values got to make it up to the top of the mountain. The mountain’s like, a mile away, it’s about a 25-minute exercise that we had. It’s about a 45-minute exercise for the O-line, takes them a little bit longer to get up to the top of the mountain.

“You’ve got these four core values. Whatever you’ve got to do, you’ve got to get these four core values up to the top of the mountain. ‘That’s it Coach?’ That’s it. First group goes. Oh, by the way, the next group’s coming two minutes behind you. If they pass you, they get to take a core value off of your arm…so, that team, boom, gone. Next team comes through, next team comes through, get them off and running off to the top of the mountain. What I didn’t tell them, was that we paired with our ROTC department.

“When the first group came into the mountain, it’s 5:30 in the morning, it’s 5:45, sun’s about to come up. They go into the mountain, they think they’re good following the path, turned the corner, boom. Speaker goes off. Gun shots. ROTC jump out of nowhere camo’d up, face painted, everything. ‘Get down! Get down! Get down! Kids were scared shitless. It was the best thing ever.”

This was a lesson on adjusting on the fly from Cahill.

“All of a sudden, adversity hit,” he continued. “That kid, your teammate, yeah, he just got shot. His leg, he can’t run. You’ve got to carry him to the top of the mountain. ‘Oh, shit. How are we going to get him to the top of the mountain?’ Shared adversity. Relying on your core values. Relying on what we talked about.

“Then, we had a couple other things. Carry another thing up. Boom. Then, we ended up getting to the top of the mountain, every kid got up to the top of the mountain. It took a little longer than we had anticipated, but it was part of the shared adversity and I really enjoyed it.”

Yale is currently going through some adversity with this sudden change after a historic season.

There may not be any mountains in New Haven (at least not directly on campus), but it sure sounds like Cahill will find a unique, creative way to bring the Bulldogs even closer together.