At long last, Strauss Mann was set to visit the University of Michigan. There were other schools to visit, true, but of course he would visit Michigan; he had to visit Michigan. He grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut but felt pulled toward Ann Arbor because...well, Mann isn’t quite sure. “I had no reason to be a fan of them but I always kind of was, so it was always a thought [to come here],” he says. And so it was that he scheduled himself and his family a junior-year tour of the campus, which had the academic programs and rigor he was looking for, as well as a sports culture that he thought would be fun to be a part of. If he was going to be a fan and not an active participant, Mann wanted to go somewhere with high-level competition and a fanbase that was passionate.

That thought—life after hockey—was one he was contemplating that year. Mann was the backup on his high school varsity hockey team, which left precious few opportunities to impress scouts and coaches in a sport that has kids barely old enough to have cell phones from which to tweet their college commitments doing so with regularity. His journey from scheduling his own Michigan tour to leading the Fargo Force to a USHL championship to starting in net for the Wolverines in the Big Ten Tournament this weekend is not only unconventional but was nearly inconceivable just a few years ago.

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That Mann ever laced up a pair of skates is something of a coincidence. He played a number of sports when he was young, including soccer and baseball, but didn’t start playing hockey until he was seven; his parents didn’t play, and he credits a group of friends for getting him interested in the game.

Mann started off primarily playing forward, but the house league he was part of had the kids rotate who played goaltender. Permanent goaltenders were in place for Mann’s second season and he wasn’t called upon to start in goal, but his team’s goalie got hurt early in the year and Mann volunteered to fill in; he had been a catcher on his baseball team and thus had some experience with objects being flung at him at high speed.

That may have helped him feel more comfortable between the pipes but wasn’t why Mann wanted to jump in; he credits the novel materials of the position like the pads and helmet for piquing his interest. He’s not captivated by the equipment the same way he was during elementary school, but Mann puts a great deal of care into his pad and helmet design to this day. His pads have the part alteration mark emoji that has been adopted by Michigan student-athletes and fans as a stylized “M.” They also have a small version of the logo that takes up most of the back of Mann’s helmet. That logo has a silhouette reminiscent of Yost Fieldhouse, while the text inside the logo says “Haus.” The “AU” at the center of the text is in a larger font as a tribute to Mann’s cousin, Andrew Unterberg, who passed away unexpectedly almost two years ago. Strauss’ sister recently made hats with the logo embroidered on them that she handed out to family members. “That’s definitely something that’s meaningful to that side of the family,” he said. “They kind of ride behind it.”

[After THE JUMP: “He’s the guy that shows up an hour before his ice session, warms up the right way, and has cooked all his meals the right way before he’s come to the rink,” he said. “He’s the most dedicated professional that’s not a pro yet that I’ve gotten the opportunity to work with.”]

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[Bill Rapai]

Other material possessions followed as Mann’s youth hockey career progressed, ones that still elicit nostalgia, like the coveted Greenwich Skating Club jackets that Mann and his teammates were given. “Everyone kind of thought they were the cool thing, so all the guys in our friend group would wear them,” said childhood friend and current Yale defenseman Phil Kemp. “It was nothing close to a letterman; it was a winter jacket for a kid kind of thing. But it had your number on it and your name, so everyone thought that was pretty cool.”

Mann fell in love with the game immediately, from the team environment to the fun of competition to, yes, the gear. As time went on, though, he found the element of goaltending that hooked him and steered the course of his life. “I think it tests you a lot mentally, having to stay present and deal with a lot of high-pressure situations,” he said. “The game’s coming to you. You can’t really take it to everyone else, so it takes a lot of mental power and mental preparation to be able to deal with that so I definitely like that part of it.”

If the mental aspect of the game has grasped the wheel and adjusted the rudder on the course of his life then a chance encounter around Christmas when Mann was 13 provided him the wayfinder he needed. He had just made the Westchester Express AAA travel team and thus was having some success at the position, but he wasn’t satisfied with his progress. Mann was at a holiday gathering in North Stamford with his family that happened to be attended by former NHL goaltender Steve Valiquette, and the two were introduced by the hosts in front of the Christmas tree. Mann and his family started chatting with Valiquette, and in that conversation Mann made clear how serious he was about being a goaltender. Valiquette had recently retired from professional hockey after a 15-year career that saw him work his way up from the ECHL to the AHL to the NHL before finishing his career with a season each in the KHL and an Italian pro league. He was looking to start teaching the position to share what he had learned not only from the ups and downs of a decade and a half trying to perfect the craft at the highest levels but from a book that changed the way he thought about life.

Valiquette first read Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code around 2009 and credits it for shaping how he views coaching. “It’s all about talent hotbeds and the nuances and coaching and how you put them in an environment that doesn’t spoil them,” Valiquette said. “If you saw the rink that we trained at—the Wonderland of Ice but we call it the Wonderland of Life in Bridgeport, Connecticut—there’s a really nice side and then there’s the old 1970s worn-down side, and that’s where we train. We refer to that as our chicken-wire Harvard.”

The book steered Valiquette toward no-frills practice locations, but perhaps more important was the way the book approached improvement, particularly in that it clashed with the way he had practiced for the better part of two decades. For much of his career Valiquette viewed practice as a period of time to get a sweat going and check off working out on the daily to-do list, but after reading The Talent Code he saw in himself the rapid improvement that could come from recreating game conditions. “Stats to me are important because they’re game conditions and in game conditions it’s very easy for us to get into that flow state, that zone, and play with F.I.R.E. [Ed. A- Valiquette’s abbreviation for focused intense repetitions every day.] You can see Strauss in practice getting into that state, so that’s why he’s been able to develop because if anything was set up where it wasn’t game conditions, I know what it’s like,” said Valiquette, who developed proprietary technology to track passes and shot attempts and is CEO of Clear Sight Analytics, a company that sells data to NHL teams.

“A goalie will easily dismiss a drill, turn off mentally, and say This never happens in a game. Now he’s turned off, the shooter gets turned off because he’s shooting on a goalie that’s not on, and now the complete practice can just unravel. We might as well get off the ice because nobody’s myelinated,” he said. “The only time he’s getting better is when he hits that flow state, that zone where his brain is rep after rep getting quality reps and then he’s able to get better and that’s why he’s been able to do it at such a rate because he is the best at getting into that mindset for practice.”

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[Coller]

Valiquette couldn’t have known that when Mann first showed up to train the summer after they met. Valiquette saw a short, chubby kid whose athleticism had yet to reveal itself. He has filmed every practice session in his eight years working with Mann from ice level so that Mann can see from the perspective of the puck. One portion of their first-ever session has Mann—decked out in a white helmet, black practice jersey, plain white blocker and glove, and two-tone leg pads—in his butterfly laboring to stop a series of shots with his blocker; the fields of empty net over his shoulders and outside his skates look like they would yield a substantial harvest.

Mann was clearly undersized at the time and is still technically so. Valiquette and Mann have identified four NHL goaltenders--Anton Khudobin, Jaroslav Halak, Juuse Saros, and Aaron Dell--with similar physical characteristics, and Mann watches as much of their film as he can during his offseason training sessions. Mann is listed as 6’0 by Michigan but continued physical development has provided a caveat to the “undersized” designation: he has a 6’4” wingspan. The fields of net over his shoulders are no longer viable for harvesting.

That still-developing wingspan couldn’t do much to help Mann during his freshman year at Brunswick. “You could see he was playing with a ton of heart, ton of passion, and that previous summer I had the Bridgeport Sound Tigers AHL guys shooting on him and they had a hard time scoring on him but he was a freshman that was undersized and relegated to JV,” Valiquette said. “And JV hockey in our region, it’s...it’s almost disheartening. You can’t even believe there’s an opportunity for you to play college if you’re playing JV.”

Things didn’t go much better Mann’s sophomore year as he bounced between JV and serving as the varsity backup. He flashed his potential during summer training sessions with Valiquette prior to his junior season but was again primarily the backup. Mann made his on-ice varsity debut that season, eventually getting into eight games and posting an excellent 1.28 GAA and .952 save percentage. A small sample size to be sure, but there were encouraging signs.

“I would say the biggest thing (that changed) was his commitment and his buy-in,” said former Brunswick teammate and current Dartmouth forward Christian LeSueur. “I think once he set his mind to putting all the chips on himself and really digging down deep and going to get what he wanted, that was really when things started to change for him.” Mann adopted a new diet prior to his junior year that has been written about extensively elsewhere. He says the easiest way to describe the diet, which he still uses, is as a more nuanced version of the Paleo diet. Mann used to have to pack coolers full of food to take with him on the road, but since getting to Michigan he has had to do less cooking for himself. These days he takes a few things he thinks will be difficult to find at the hotel: avocados, broccoli, sweet potatoes, organic steak, and the coconut water he drinks between periods.

Even with the sparkly stats and the buy-in and the new diet and the offseason work, Mann still wasn’t the anointed starter heading into his senior year. Valiquette was talking with then-head coach Ron VanBelle prior to the season, and VanBelle told Valiquette that he wasn’t sure Mann would be “able to carry the mail” for Brunswick. Valiquette told VanBelle about the frustrations that Division I players had shooting on Mann over the summer; Mann won the job and soon made New England Prep Schools Interscholastic Hockey Association skaters feel DI-skater levels of frustration en route to USHS first-team All-New England honors. “Obviously you have a ton going on as a teenager, a lot of distractions, and he really just totally bought in and as I said before, it’s commendable and as a fellow athlete something that you have to respect and honestly gives you some inspiration,” said LeSueur. “It’s nothing short of incredible, the time and effort that he puts in.”

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[Coller]

There were, however, times where some outside noise got through and became a distraction for Mann during his senior year. His goal had long been to play college hockey, and as the year progressed he started to text Valiquette a few too many times about which teams had lost commitments from certain players. Valiquette thought Mann was too concerned with off-ice matters and set up a monthly dinner with Strauss’ parents to talk over any potential college or junior hockey options. “He’s done a very good job of disciplining himself not to be online looking at things that I know can throw a lot of other kids off course,” Valiquette said.

The parent/coach meetings helped keep the noise out and Mann held up his end of the bargain by narrowing his focus to solely on-ice concerns. He posted a 2.41 GAA and .936 save percentage in 22 games that season. “‘Surprised’ isn’t the right word because I saw how hard he works, but I would assume from an outsider’s perspective it was a bit of a meteoric rise even between junior and senior year alone basically going from a backup who didn’t get a ton of experience to first-team All-New England,” said LeSueur, Brunswick’s captain that season. “That’s a huge feat, so yeah, obviously he was the backbone of our team that season and there were definitely a significant amount of games that we probably wouldn’t have won if not for him.”

Mann didn’t have the Division I offer he coveted despite his senior-year success, so he, his family, and Valiquette decided that a year of junior hockey would provide the exposure, training, and challenge needed for him to land an offer to play college hockey; according to the USHL’s website, 95% of their players receive Division I opportunities. The numbers sounded good, but there was still the pesky issue of making a team. Mann wasn’t selected in the USHL draft and thus had to attend combines and try-outs in hopes of making it through the series of cuts and onto a roster.

Ann Arbor came to close to becoming the second city in the state of Michigan Mann would call his hockey home; he made it to the very last cut at Muskegon Lumberjacks camp. “I know it’s difficult for goalies especially because there’s only two spots on a team in the USHL and you’re fighting for those games to try and showcase your skills to a college team,” said Kemp, who played in the USHL with the U.S. NTDP. “I remember hearing about him going to a couple camps, him getting some good looks, then Fargo offering him the spot and we were all jacked up for him.”

The roster spot Kemp is alluding to was offered after someone in the Muskegon front office made a call to the Fargo Force to let them know that there wasn’t a spot for Mann in Muskegon but that he was worth considering for a walk-on spot should Fargo have room. “So he went to Fargo and made the team out of training camp there and I’m sure they thought he was just going to be their backup and in typical Strauss fashion I watched a couple games early in the year and I was like, ‘Strauss, you’re taking this thing. Here’s your mindset: you’re taking the starting job by Christmas, alright? Here’s what you’re going to do,’” Valiquette said. “We talked through that and then he did exactly what he set out to do: he took over.”

Mann played in 34 games during the 2017-18 regular season and recorded a stellar 1.86 GAA and .932 save percentage. He also started every playoff game for the Force that spring, and though his GAA rose a bit his save percentage was identical to the regular season. Mann finished the season as the starting goaltender of the Clark Cup champions, a win he calls the biggest of his career to this point.

Moving halfway across the country as a teenager to live with a host family with the pressure of winning a starting job, guiding a team to a title, and hoping to generate interest from colleges doesn’t make for an easy year. Mann found an unexpected source of support in U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame inductee Mike Richter, whose son happened to be Mann’s teammate in his final season at Brunswick. “He definitely helped me with a little bit of mentoring, especially in my year of juniors when I was out in Fargo alone and hadn’t really been through any of that before,” said Mann. Valiquette watched a number of Brunswick games with Richter when Mann was a senior and watched as Richter’s enthusiasm for Strauss’ game increased; this isn’t a huge surprise, as Kemp says Mann plays like a Jimmy Craig/Mike Richter hybrid. “He said at the end of the year, ‘Steve, if you need any help with Strauss, I will call anybody for this guy. I will call anyone. I love this kid.’ That goes a long way. People are going to help you, man. You’ve got good manners, you’re a really nice kid, you do everything the right way, and Mike Richter will put his name on the line for you,” Valiquette said. “If I remember it correctly once again I believe Mike called Michigan for Strauss as well. And again, man, it goes back to doing it the right way. Do it the right way; put your time in and people are going to help you. When the student is ready the teacher appears.”

Valiquette does remember correctly; Richter called someone at Michigan to let them know about the kid plying his trade in Fargo. Bill Muckalt reached out to Mann, who could barely believe what he was hearing: Michigan was interested in having him visit. It just so happened that the U.S. National Team Development Program plays in the USHL, and Mann’s team was scheduled to travel to Plymouth to play the NTDP November 30th and December 1st. Mann got the start on the 1st and visited Michigan a day later. “When I was a junior in high school I visited Michigan as a student just on a regular visiting day because at that time I was a backup on my high school team so just I thought I’d probably go to college,” he said. “So I was seeing a bunch of schools and saw Michigan and did the tour there so once I came here and did the official visit I kind of already saw a lot of it, but I didn’t really mention that to them because I didn’t know if that’d be a great argument on my part for why they should commit me.” His approach worked; Mann was offered a spot and committed to Michigan two days later.

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[JD Scott]

The goalie situation when Mann first enrolled at Michigan was similar to the one he found himself in when he arrived in Fargo. Hayden Lavigne had just backstopped Michigan to a Frozen Four appearance and Mann had finally achieved his dream of making a Division I hockey roster, so it wouldn’t have been surprising if human nature had kicked in and he had taken the 2018-19 season easy. What else do you do if you’re 20 years old and you’ve achieved your most closely held dream? If you’re Mann, you recalibrate on the fly and pick something bigger.

“Right away, being at a school like Michigan it was easy to come up with new goals because we have the ability to win some pretty big things here, some pretty big trophies, so right away I just wanted to win national championships or hopefully play pro one day,” Mann said. “That’s always in the back of your head but at the end of the day just trying to do what I can while I’m here and work as hard as I can every day. That’s how the bigger things come.”

Kemp agreed. “It’s honestly like his personality flows into his game where he’s extremely team-driven; he wants his team to succeed as bad as he wants himself to succeed. Probably more so his team, but he’s maybe the hardest working person I know,” he said. “He’s willing to give up anything for his success. Honestly, it’s something to look at as really impressive and honestly I admire that in him and I try to take pages out of his book as much as I can.”

“On the ice, I think the first thing that sticks out is the pride that he takes obviously in his game but (also) the team’s success. I remember when we lost his senior year to Avon in the semifinals of the Large School he was devastated. He sat in his pads for probably 20, 30 minutes without moving and you can really see how much he cares. Obviously as a goalie it can be a bit of an isolated position and you kind of focus on yourself a bit more but no, he’ll be the first guy to give a guy a tap if he makes a good play defensively,” said LeSueur. “Then I think on the flip side of that, seeing things pay off and when we won the national championship and seeing the joy on his face, I think those two images are a good contrast of everything that he’s worked towards and honestly continues to work towards. Those two memories coming within a month or two of each other, I think they’re a very good summation of how he is both on and off the ice.”

Mann worked closely with Steve Shields his freshman year and ended up splitting time that season with Lavigne through the regular season until Michigan’s must-win Big Ten Tournament games, of which he started both. He played well in the 21 opportunities he was given, but his 2.91 GAA and .895 save percentage didn’t live up to the standards he set for himself. He wanted to work. “For a guy like Strauss, if he just showed up somewhere with his hockey bag, put it down in the locker room and said ‘Okay, what do you want to do today?’ that wouldn’t be enough for him because when we go to video it’s like, ‘Well, Steve, I really want to talk about why we’re doing this.’ ‘Well, okay Strauss, this is why we’re doing it. Because guess what? Frederik Anderson last year had 375 shots from here and he stopped them all because he was standing exactly in this spot. Look where you’re standing,’” Valiquette said. “I use our analytics a lot now. With this new generation it works, too, because they want to know why. Why are we doing this? I don’t want to waste my time. Time is limited.”

That was the message Mann delivered when he returned home last summer to train with Valiquette: every minute of training needed to be maximized. Valiquette recalled this moment and laughed. Of course they were going to maximize their time. One story from last summer’s training stood out to Valiquette. Something was off in Mann’s stance; Valiquette believed that Mann was too upright, which was causing pucks to go in underneath his hands and his stick to get too high off the ice. “Strauss, look at the video here, man,” Valiquette said. “We’ve got to get you back down and around the puck.” Mann disagreed, and he maintained the more upright stance for weeks. Valiquette wasn’t upset; both he and Michigan goaltending coach Kris Mayotte noted that a coach can give a player suggestions on what to try and how to fix an issue but at the end of the day the goaltender is the one on the ice and has to feel comfortable with what they’re doing. It appears mentorship works better than dictatorship. “We fought about it but when I saw his game on NBC against Notre Dame about a month and a half ago now I was like Oh my god, this guy is down, wrapped, like NHL all the way, maximizing your size, body illusion and I called him afterwards and I was like, ‘Man, you are on it.’ I was really excited to talk to him about that,” said Valiquette. “It’s funny because by coincidence that day I had two NHL teams call me about him that same day, and then he went out and played like that and one of them was at the game so I talked to his dad afterwards and I was like, ‘You think you’re having a good day watching Strauss? I just heard from—and I won’t say the teams that called because that’s their business—but people are talking about him.’”

Would front offices be talking about Mann if he wasn’t so mentally resilient? He’s had opportunity after opportunity to fall to doubt or self-pity but has worked through each instance, and that mental toughness has become intertwined with his on-ice game. “One of the biggest contributors to his success would be just the warrior mentality or that compete level. It’s probably unmatched from what I’ve seen,” said LeSueur. “Obviously the technique and the fundamentals are all there and that’s something as a goalie you just have to trust are going to be there night in and night out but some nights you have to manufacture that compete and he does it so well and so consistently every night.”

That mentality—as Valiquette calls it, “next puck, next play”—is something he tries to cultivate in all the goalies he trains. As he said, “If you give up a goal in practice in goalie training or your team practice, the next one’s a save because you can’t have the habit that carries over from practice into a game where you’re comfortable giving up a goal and then allowing another one because you’re going to be out of the net wearing a hat at the end of the bench.” At times, though, he wonders whether his other goaltenders will have the same resilience; when Mann was younger Valiquette would drive him an hour each way to a rink in New Jersey for training sessions, and on those trips he would share the hardships he went through playing for 15 different organizations in 15 seasons. There were incalculable ups and downs in Valiquette’s career, but there was always a will to keep trying. At one point there was a six-season gap in which he didn’t play in more than two NHL games in a year, but at the tail end of his career he strung together three consecutive NHL seasons and even appeared in two playoff games for the Rangers in 2008-09.

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[Coller]

Kris Mayotte has seen Mann shrug off adversity in ways both big and small this season. “A lot of times goalies want to do more and try and do more and he’s just very committed to doing what he can, and he understands his position and the role that it plays and that his consistency is everything for our team,” he said. “And when you have a goalie that can be consistent your team starts to know what to expect and then they can go out and play their game rather than waiting for something to go wrong.”

Mayotte then recounted one of his favorite stories of Mann staring down adversity. Michigan was in Columbus to face Ohio State the first night of November. Mann allowed a puck to get past him a minute and a half into the third period to tie the game 2-2, and the next shot he faced was a cannon of a one-timer from the high slot. Mann made the save, which Mayotte considered his best of the night. “He’s done that in the first five minutes of games where maybe we’ve given up some chances or some breakaways, he’s made that save, but I think he’s also been able to, even after a goal’s given up, make that next big save that sometimes is the best save of the game and really keeps it in a place that is good for us, because if our team shows a little crack and gives up that next big chance he’s there to make sure that it doesn’t really hurt us.”

Mann has made similarly rapid adjustments in practice this season. Mayotte watched film of Mann’s freshman season when he was first hired and saw an intense competitor who sometimes competed himself away from efficiency. Mayotte wanted to work on Mann’s situational awareness—he thought Mann was excellent at tracking the puck but would be an even better goaltender once he started recognizing where secondary and tertiary threats were—but thought depth was a better starting point. “We talked about it, he went out the next ice session, focused on it for probably 5-10 minutes, and we haven’t had to talk about it since,” Mayotte said. “It just happened that quickly for him.”

“You know how you have some of those people and they talk about paralysis by analysis?” Mayotte asked. “He is literally the opposite. He is someone who the more info, the more understanding that he has the better he is and in general the more comfortable he is. He has that ability—like I said with the depth thing—he just takes it, he tries it, he thinks about it; you can almost see him mentally doing some physical reps in his head and then all of a sudden it’s done.”

So much of Mann’s success between the pipes has come from between his ears, and that includes his preternatural self-discipline. Mann’s aforementioned diet has generated headlines, but Mayotte thinks that’s just because of the nature of dieting. “I started to tell people this about the diet: I think it’s just simply the most relatable thing that he does to people out there, but he does that in every aspect of his game,” he said. “The thing about his diet is that it’s planned, prepared, again there’s detail in it, there’s research behind it, there’s a thought process to it, and so I think for everybody including myself and my wife and anybody I talk to it’s easy to relate to diet. ‘Oh wow, that sounds hard. Wow, he puts a lot into that.’” 

But Mann’s diligence goes so far beyond what he eats. For example, Michigan practiced at the Ann Arbor Ice Cube instead of Yost prior to their trip to Minnesota. The switch in environment was an open invitation for routines to be altered, but Mann refused to budge from what he does to prepare for a successful practice. “He’s completely committed to it, where I think sometimes other people let it fall away a little bit,” Mayotte said. “I’m a better eater at home than when I go on the road recruiting. It just seems to be human nature but his habits are his habits and he sticks to it better than most.” And so there was Mann rolling a softball over the bottoms of his feet and shins and preparing his legs for practice the way he always does.

Valiquette has seen Mann’s diligence up close for years. “He’s the guy that shows up an hour before his ice session, warms up the right way, and has cooked all his meals the right way before he’s come to the rink,” he said. “He’s the most dedicated professional that’s not a pro yet that I’ve gotten the opportunity to work with.”

Planning and preparation and process are all fine tools, but they are dull ones if not backed by information. Mann looks for as much of it as he can get his hands on; it’s why he loves to break down video with his coaches, trusts analytics, and has so finely tuned his diet and warm-up routine. This is nothing new for him, either. Kemp remembers that their mutual interest in the New York Mets was something they bonded over as kids. There was a problem, though: Mets games went past their bedtime. Mann could have just checked the box score the next morning, but that wasn’t enough. He recorded the end of every game and watched it the next morning. “I’m a die-hard Mets fan too, said Kemp, “but he was at another level.” If Mann’s current trajectory continues Valiquette is going to field more phone calls, and soon Mann will be playing at another level. 

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Goaltenders are famously eccentric. Jacques Plante would not socialize with teammates and had to sit in the same seat on the team bus. Giles Gratton refused to play when the moon was in the wrong part of the sky. Dominik Hasek liked to clip his nails between periods but did not want his teammates touching his nail clippers, so he had them velcroed to his dressing-room stall to ensure they stayed in the right place. Chris Osgood was so vehemently opposed to changing helmet models that Paul Boyer, Detroit’s equipment manager, had the Wings’ color commentator ask viewers to scrounge up any parts they might have for the outdated helmet; he also took up a team masseuse’s offer to ship Boyer two of the ancient helmets he had stored in his garage in Russia.

Your author will admit that, upon hearing last summer that Michigan had a goaltender who meticulously prepared his meals and even traveled with his own cooler stocked with food, he believed the Wolverines might have a throwback netminder on their roster. Surely there would be some interesting story about how one playoff series he ate a certain meal and had an incredible game and now has to prepare and eat said meal no matter the inconvenience or something like that.

As is the case with these profiles, preconceived notions are really just poorly conceived notions. Everything you need to know to get to the heart of Strauss Mann’s story comes through when he’s asked about superstition. “I don’t want to base my performance off whether I turn the lights off at a certain time or not, but at the same time I do try and do everything to get myself prepared and then once gametime comes just kind of let go of everything and just play,” he said. “Superstition is more relying on something else to affect your play. I just try and prepare the best I can and know that I could fail and it could go poorly, but I’d rather give it all I can and fail than not try my hardest.”