Welcome back to Irish Illustrated Insider. I'm Tim O'Malley, joined today by Pete Sampson the Athletic. John Bryce, the football scoop. We spent Wednesday with new Irish defensive pass the game coordinator, cornerbacks coach Aaron Henry, as well as two handfuls of early enrollees. I spent Tuesday night guys watching a varsity team play an eighth grade team and a packed gym on campus. I'm not really sure why that game was put together as such. But we'll get to that a little bit later here in segment one. Pete, I know you're flying during some of the interviews. Just you're kind of your impressions of when you got to read what was said. And I know you're working on a story on Jonas Walton as well. Yeah. I was down in Atlanta doing something on Teddy Gerard for next week.

But yeah, it's Aaron Henry, very impressive, not surprising based on, I mean, I didn't know him before this, but people who did really, really like the guy.

So, yeah, I thought he was an excellent communicator.

You have to compress your verbiage sometimes in college football.

So he's definitely got a lot of words.

It was a long transcript.

Yeah, he's got, he's very articulate guy.

And I think, like, I think one of the things I really liked about him is he came across

as very comfortable in his own skin. And I think we've all think one of the things I really liked about him is he came across as very comfortable in his own skin.

And I think we've all covered coaches that come from new other places where maybe it didn't end on great terms.

Maybe it did.

But they're awkward.

There's like you get the, I just want to focus on the future.

I'm not here to talk about the past type of stuff.

And I just think it takes a certain

amount of self-confidence to be like to go on about Brett B. LeMondon, how great a guy was and how

important he was his career, how grateful he was to Illinois and, you know, what he learned there.

You know, Devin Witherspoon obviously is a good, something he would want to talk about. But I just, I think there are a lot of coaches, they change jobs and they, they don't like to go back and sort of give a tip of the half to where they were before because it's just, they feel like they have to be all in on where they are. And it's, I don't know. I just, I think that shows kind of a maturity and a, I think a good perspective on the job.

You know, he talked about being, you know, going to the ministry potentially.

You know, I thought it was interesting to talk about his wife as like a psychologist.

So yeah, I feel like we learned more about Aaron Henry in his first interview than we did on a personal level about Mike Mickens in six years.

He just, he shared a lot. It was really interesting to listen to.

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