Jim Harbaugh’s Chargers debut at camp is wacky and wonderful

Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh stands behind quarterback Justin Herbert on the first day of training camp.

Columnist

July 24, 2024 4:22 PM PT

He strutted around the deep green football fields like a new father, shouting and gesturing and celebrating with cheers and compliments and a loudly blown whistle.

Then Jim Harbaugh explained.

His first official training camp practice as the Chargers coach was like…childbirth?

Yeah, childbirth.

“Just like being born,” he said after Wednesday’s inaugural training camp workout at the Chargers’ gleaming new El Segundo practice facility. “It was like coming out of the womb. It’s comfortable and safe, and now you’re born. The lights are on. It’s bright and there’s chaos. People are looking, people talking to each other and, just feels good to have it happen.”

Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh surveys the field during the first day of training camp.

Oh, it’s happening all right. In a wondrous culmination of an offseason of labor, the new Chargers era began Wednesday with their new $16-million coach filling up their new $250-million home with wit and wisdom and just plain weirdness.

It was truly a bolt to the senses.

Harbaugh showed up in throwback black cleats, baggy black pants, and enough gravitas that his five-win team spent the morning playing with such unbridled enthusiasm, he felt obliged to give the strangest of orders. He asked players to please stop hitting each other.

“We’re not in pads. When we’ve got no armor, you know, we’re wearing pants and jerseys and helmets. So we can’t, we can’t play like we’re like we’re in football pads,” Harbaugh said, replaying his demonstrative post-practice speech. “So you know, to me, I’m just this with them…”

He lowered his hands in a slow-down motion, then proceeded to pull out another metaphor.

“My analogy would be a plane taking off the runway,” he said. “It goes from a dead start, it starts to build up speed and has so much speed it has to get off the ground. And then it takes off and it’s not too long until you are at 30,000 feet, so just making sure that you don’t have any mishaps while …we’re in the glide path.”

There certainly was no gliding Wednesday, only banging and grunting and growling and, oh yeah, chugging.

One of the delightful quirks of the Chargers’ impressive and impactful new facility — dubbed “The Bolt” — is the constant presence of Metrolink trains running on an elevated track beyond the practice fields. Most coaches would ignore the potential distraction. Harbaugh, naturally, embraces it.

“I was just happy to see that somebody’s riding it,” he said of the normally empty cars. “It seems like a pretty cool thing. I mean, the clickety-clack, clickety-clack, there’s no better way to get around, in my opinion.”

Thus making Harbaugh the first coach in NFL history to answer a question using the words, “clickety-clack, clickety-clack.”

Once again, he explained.

“My grandfather was … a longtime brakeman,” Harbaugh said. “He became an engineer in the last couple of years of his career, so the Harbaugh affinity for trains is…”

Harbaugh pounded his chest in his umpteenth gesture of the day, the coach filled with enough charm and eccentricity to command a Hollywood stage.

Indeed, if the Chargers experience the same turnaround that Harbaugh once engineered with the San Francisco 49ers, they will become Hollywood’s team.

In his first season with the 49ers in 2011, he flipped a 6-10 team into the NFC championship game. The Chargers’ two most important veterans talk like Harbaugh can make that happen here.

“He’s a leader and wants it every day,” safety Derwin James Jr. said. “It’s contagious, and he passes it down from the coaches to the players. We want to go out and play hard.”

Justin Herbert agreed.

“He’s a guy that definitely everyone wants to follow,” the quarterback said. “He’s a great leader and obviously very smart and intelligent. He’s played the game. He knows how to coach it and how to motivate it. So to have him around has been awesome and I’ve learned a bunch.”

The excitement emanating from their head coach actually first surfaced Tuesday night, when the Chargers’ all-world social media team released a preseason hype video narrated by Harbaugh himself.

In a dramatic monologue also written by Harbaugh, the coach took a direct shot at his former college rival, Ohio State coach Ryan Day.

“Welcome to the 2024 Chargers locker room, your football home,” Harbaugh intones on the latest Chargers social media triumph. “We want to compliment all who have earned the opportunity to get here, to recognize the journey traveled, to now be playing at the highest level of football. None here were born on third base, but rather had to work your way to first, then second, then third.”

When Harbaugh was at Michigan, he famously reacted to Day’s smack talk by using the third-base reference to claim the coach had not paid his dues.

“A lot of people that are standing on third base think they’ve hit a triple,” Harbaugh said of Day in 2021 after his first win over the Buckeyes.

Time and distance have clearly not ended their feud, which still is filled with an energy that Harbaugh clearly has carried with him to the NFL, where he will make plenty of noise, beginning now.

On Wednesday, in front of a full house in the cozy confines of The Bolt, a city got its first look at its newest football star, and it was an impressive one.

“The first step that we take is like life,” Harbaugh said. “The first step is a decisive one.”

Step taken. Journey started. Kicking and screaming.