Quick Links
Social
Search the Website

An interview with Charlie Gelman

From Camp to the Colts

by Sam Hirt

 

When Charlie Gelman was a kid, he knew what he wanted to be when grew up. He wanted to coach in the NFL.

After his teacher told him that was a silly goal, he doubled down, chose a college that “had good basketball” to entertain him in the offseason, and worked hard at stats and analytics. This eventually led to an internship and, ultimately, a career in the NFL – his childhood dream realized.

His time as a camper, and then a staff member, at Camp Tecumseh ingrained a skill set he used to achieve his dreams, and that he still uses today as a coach.

What is your first memory of camp? I was in fifth grade. I was a Brave. It was my first year as a camper and I went with my friend, Mason. I was really sick that week. Like, I was barfing and stuff, and I was like, oh, this is gonna be the worst week ever. And then, by the time my dad picked me up, I was like, why’d you come here? I wanted to stay here longer.

So you started as a Brave. Talk about your experience from there. What happened next? Yeah. So I was Brave for one year, Blazer for one year, a Warrior for one year, and then a Pathfinder for two years. My first two years, I would go for just one week. My warrior year, I went for two weeks. And then both my Pathfinder years, I would go for three weeks. So I was a big time camper.

Then I was a CILT (Camper in Leadership Training).

Then I was on day camp staff for two years, and then my next year, after my freshman year of college, I was a fill-in counselor. I couldn’t stay the whole summer because I was starting to work for the football team at Duke. I had to go for training camp, so I was only (at Camp), I think, for two weeks.

How do you pick Duke? So I picked Duke because I wanted a good academic school that also had good basketball.

I knew I was going to try to work for a football team once I got to school, so I wanted to go to a school with good basketball so that way I could watch that in the off season. And so I reached out to a bunch of schools in high school, and Duke responded to me, and Virginia also responded to me. Okay, those are the two schools I’m thinking about, and I just ultimately liked Duke better.

Here we pause to order a couple of sandwiches.

 

Obviously you did pretty well academically in high school to get into Duke, right? Yeah, I definitely tried really hard.

What did you want to study? Did you end up studying that thing? I just knew I wanted to major in football, but when I first got there, I was majoring in EC, so electrical and computer engineering, and then slowly I realized this doesn’t make sense for me to study because it doesn’t really have much to do with football. So I switched to stats and computer science, and then eventually I got to a point where I wanted to graduate at the end of my fall semester of senior year, so that way I could line up with the football hiring cycle, which is right after football season. So in January, I ended up dropping my comp sci major to have made it a minor and just majored in stats.

What do you mean when you say you wanted to major in football? So I just knew I wanted to work in football when I was done – any level, but mostly NFL. I’d wanted to be an NFL coach for as long as I can remember. So when I got there, I just tried to work for the football team as best I could, and I would do things on my own until I got hired by them. So eventually I became a video assistant the spring of my freshman year.

How did that come about? I started working for the wrestling team, doing analytics for them. And they asked me what I wanted to do after college. I said I wanted to work in football. And they said, if you do a good job this first year, we’ll talk to the football team about you. So after my first year working in wrestling, I was also a video student, just like assisting filming practice at Duke football, and the wrestling team called the football chief of staff, saying, hey, you should talk to this guy. He forgot to talk to me, until one day, my check from being a video assistant accidentally went into the wrong mailbox and went into this guy’s mailbox so that he’s like, “shoot, I just remembered I gotta call this guy.”

So he calls me, brings me to the football facility and says, Hey, we’re just gonna have a conversation. Just bring your laptop. So I go there and he leads me into this dark room, and in this room is just every defensive coach on the football staff. He hands me an HDMI cable, and is like, can you show us what studies you’ve done? Like, let’s see what you got. Looking back, I think they thought, this guy wants to work and stuff, and he wants to learn from us. So that summer is when I started working for the football team.

That moment they handed you the HDMI cable, what did you do? I was really stressed. I was just showing them random studies that I had done. I used to have a formula for predicting NFL games and stuff. So I’d show them my results and predictions and how things work. If I plugged in a different player here, this is how it would affect their chances of winning. And so, we can use that to evaluate players.

You feel like some of the things you’re learning or experiencing at camp are aligned with you developing as a person at Duke? Oh yeah. I mean the biggest thing, obviously, is the Cameron Crazies. I was so weird. It was very similar to the camp environment. I mean, shoot, we lived in tents.

You lived in tents? So, okay, for us to go to the UNC game second semester, you have to tent out from the beginning of the semester until the game. So like for my freshman year, for example, is a 10 week long tenting season. So there’s 12 of you in the tent. 10 people have to be there at all times at night. Two people have to be there at all times during the day. You just sleep in the tent. So I mean, I’m sleeping in the tent five out of seven days a week. It was awesome.

Charlie and his friends would dress up in different themes for the games. For a number of games, they wore ponchos and yelled splash at every made three.

It’s a lot like Opening Campfire at Overnight Camp. It’s exactly like that.

Was Camp’s influence making its way into your football world? I think I really see camp a lot more when I present to football teams. Because whenever we present to teams, the one thing that I love to do is I love to make like a bit, because it gets them locked in. And so, in college, we used to have a segment in special teams meetings called Charlie’s Chatter. And they would play the Charlie Brown music.

Now, here at the Colts, we do this thing called the not top 10, where I show them situational plays from around the league each week. Here’s something that went against our coaching points, and here’s how it ended up going bad for that team.

While at Duke, Charlie enters the Big Data Bowl, a competition for those doing stats and analytics where they submit a paper to the NFL to be judged. Most entries were done by teams of grad students. The Baltimore Ravens noticed that Charlie was an undergrad and submitted his project solo (and received Honorable Mention), and invited him for a Summer internship. A little over a year later, he was hired by Baltimore’s Game Manager to do analytics full time.

At Camp, as you remember, we teach the Sagamore Creed which include the values: Trust, respect, initiative, joy, faith, and friendship. It’s clear to me that initiative has always been a strength of yours. I knew what I wanted to be. You can see in my fifth grade yearbook they made us write down what we want to be when we grow up. I said I wanted to be an NFL coach, and they said that’s not realistic enough. So I wrote I wanted to be a sports announcer, which was not true at all. I wanted to be an NFL coach.

A couple seasons later, the Game Manager coaching job at the Colts is open. Charlie knows an analytics guy who knows Shane Steichen, the head coach of the Colts, and encourages Steichen to interview Charlie for the open role.

I come in, I interview. Shane basically runs me through a bunch of situations, asking what would I be saying on the headset? And when this comes up, would I go for it on this fourth down, all that kind of stuff.

I interviewed with Chris Ballard, and then after I interviewed with all these people, they flew me home. Next week, I don’t hear anything. Then I get a text on a Friday night. I’m at my friend’s house. I get a text that says, hey, this is Shane. I want to zoom interview you on Sunday, and I want you to present these three things. So I leave my friend’s house and go right to work.

I remember I felt really good after that, but then I didn’t hear from them for six days. It’s during the draft. On Saturday, day three of the draft, I’m at work and it’s like 11 AM, the draft starts in an hour. I got a call from Shane. He’s like, hey, you want to be a Colt? I go, yeah. You can start on Monday, right? And I go, yeah, I can start on Monday. Flew to Indy the next day.

If you think about some of the skills you learned while working at Camp, what comes to mind? Getting people unified and rallying without being an overly serious person, you can gain respect and trust.

You unify people in a fun and unique way. Why should someone work at Camp? It’s the most fun you’ll ever have at a job.

More fun than the NFL? (Laughingly) Depends if we win or lose.

You’re not going to have a more fulfilling job and a job that will benefit you more for the future. It changes the way you live your life. It changes the way you approach the world. You grow in so many ways that you don’t normally get the opportunity to at that age.

No matter what job you’re in, you have to work with other people. No other job will prepare you for working with other people than Camp will.