How Harry Hiestand, Matt Balis shaped former Notre Dame OL Mike McGlinchey into an NFL starter

On3 imageby:Tyler Horka04/19/22

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Playing football for Notre Dame was a dream come true for Mike McGlinchey. But the current San Francisco 49ers offensive lineman’s collegiate career didn’t necessarily get off to a dream start.

McGlinchey redshirted in his first year at Notre Dame. The Irish held a starters versus backups scrimmage in September that season. Ones versus twos. McGlinchey faced off with sack master Stephon Tuitt, a junior in his third and final year at Notre Dame. Tuitt was a future NFL starter in his own right, much closer to reaching that pinnacle than McGlinchey.

The results of the reps proved that.

“This man tossed me side to side like crazy,” McGlinchey said on the Inside the Garage podcast. “I couldn’t even stand on my feet. I was face-planting every play.”

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Notre Dame offensive line coach Harry Hiestand didn’t baby his first-year player. He turned the situation into as intense a teaching point as they come. Rather, an ultimatum of sorts.

“That was embarrassing,” McGlinchey recalls Hiestand saying, with an expletive thrown in for good measure. “You better figure it out before I try to play you somewhere or else you aren’t going to be playing for me ever.”

“I was like, ‘Shoot, man,’” McGlinchey said. “‘This is as bad as it gets, right?’”

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If “as bad as it gets” is getting chewed out by a coach who has produced NFL talent under his watch time and time again, then that’s not so bad after all. From a team standpoint, though, “as bad as it gets” for the Fighting Irish was 2016’s 4-8 finish.

McGlinchey was a team captain that year. He remembers calling fellow former Notre Dame offensive lineman Quenton Nelson during bowl season asking him what they had to do to improve by leaps and bounds in 2017. Former Irish head coach Brian Kelly knew how he could do his part in making that happen.

Kelly overhauled his coaching staff. He brought in strength and conditioning coach Matt Balis in the process.

“That was the No. 1 hire Coach Kelly ever made at Notre Dame,” McGlinchey said. “I’m very fortunate and very thankful that he stayed with Coach (Marcus) Freeman because he is as vital to the Notre Dame football program as anybody out there.”

McGlinchey didn’t think twice about that assertion.

“This guy changed the face of our football program. He made us winners, he made us tough, he made us work. All that stuff we were skipping over. It was one of the hardest three or four month stretches I’ve ever had physically in football. Those workouts were a complete shift from what we did previously.”

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Balis is entering his sixth season at Notre Dame. A video of him announcing to the team that he was staying in South Bend no matter who was hired to replace Kelly went viral. Balis ended up being the one “introducing” Freeman to the team as the new head coach too. Not long after, Freeman hired Hiestand as Notre Dame’s new offensive line coach.

If Balis was the most important hire Kelly ever made, then Hiestand might end up receiving that title for Freeman. With both of them together again working in tandem, McGlinchey has no doubt the current crop of Irish players are getting the best guidance possible.

“I never lacked in development because it was sink or swim every day with Coach Hiestand,” McGlinchey said. “You either proved what you got, or you were going to probably go home crying. That was the way that it went.

“Balis amplified that even more. It drove a fire for competition, wanting to do better, wanting to be a better teammate to the guy next to you. Everyone was counting on you. Nobody was slipping through the cracks anymore.”

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