MORGANTOWN — As we rapidly approach the Fourth of July and what has musically been referred to as “the lazy, hazy days of summer,” college sports take a break and the local pool becomes the field of play and a quiet lake filled with hungry fish offer up the competitive challenge of the moment.

But we know that it won’t be long before the cabana will be replaced by the locker room, the towel boy by the water boys and that shapely young lady across the pool will become a 6-foot, 5-inch, 288-pound defensive tackle across the line of scrimmage.

Thoughts of that glistening pool you were laying aside turn into words once uttered by West Virginian Lou Holtz back when he was winning a national championship as coach of Notre Dame.

“No one ever drowned in sweat,” he said, speaking of what goes into a winning football player after he’s through thinking about a nice summer day at a cool pool.

It’s so nice now in the heat of summer, when they are swatting tennis balls at Wimbledon, hitting golf balls on manicured golf courses or playing baseball in a watered-down version of what once was America’s pastime when you could collide with a catcher or break up a double play or knock down a hitter if he tried to show you up.

Once upon a time sports were played with a hard edge and football was at the forefront of it. It didn’t matter if the stadium was full or not, for the loudest sounds were not cheers but collisions. It was the way games were played from football to basketball to even tennis, as John McEnroe can attest to.

Baseball even had a non-fraternization rule for which players were fined if opponents fraternized with one another during games or before or after them. The truth is that rule still exists, reading “Players of opposing teams shall not fraternize at any time while in uniform.”

They just don’t enforce it, so you see opponents constantly laughing and joking with each other, even at the most crucial times of games.

But football is a game where you have a week to prepare both physically and mentally and as much as they try to tame it down by the rules, it basically remains the game where the meanest, toughest, strongest and fastest survive.

Now it doesn’t just happen that those kinds of teams come together.

I saw a quote recently recounting a former Chicago Bears’ player who was with the championship team Mike Ditka put together in the 1980s, which unveiled the secret to that success.

“The games were easy. It was the practice that was hard.”

Ditka turned the games into that summer day at the pool by the way he worked his players and you know that even now, as they are preparing to put the hot dogs on the grill and have the beer on ice that Rich Rodriguez’s mouth is watering not from the thoughts of the holiday menu but to get back to work on the football field.

Rodriguez lives by the way football was played in the ’80s when Ditka had his “Monsters of the Midway” and when he had walked on to play for Don Nehlen at West Virginia as his program was growing into a national championship challenger.

You know if Rodriguez was unhappy at any one thing from last season’s 4-8 disaster it was not that the record was so bad but that his team wasn’t tough enough and he can’t wait to get them out there in the heat of summer to try and drown them in their sweat.

“For me, it’s not been any different,” Rodriguez said. “It could be 1990 at Glenville State College. The sense of urgency has always been the same for me. It doesn’t matter whether I’m in the first year with the program or the seventh year of the program, whatever it’s going to be,” he said last year.

He knows what it was like walking on under Nehlen and what it takes to create a football monster.

“That whole experience taught me you can be demanding and be tough on your players and they still understand that you love them and the reason you do it is for them to reach their full potential,” he said.

“Today they tell me you can’t be demanding on your players. Well, what the hell am I here for then? You know what I mean? I might as well do something else.”

So, he’s ready to go.

To his players, enjoy the break, but get ready to be coached hard, because he’s had to live all offseason with that 49-0 loss to Texas Tech on his shoulder and he wants no more of that.