The Air Academy football team plans to bring the juice this season

EL PASO COUNTY, Colo. (KRDO) -- “Our players do a great job of bringing the juice every single, every single day, every single game,” says Nico Tolini.

The juice breeds competition, and competition breeds a winning culture. “Then the whole sideline erupts. Like we'll make a big play. The whole sideline erupts. It's us. We love you and each other on it. We love the brotherhood that we created,” says Air Academy head coach Waymond Jackson.

Practice makes perfect, and for the seniors, the practices are even harder than the games. “Right? Sometimes, you know, things get a little escalated. But, you know, we love that. We love having competition here,” says Cade Ballard.

It’s like going to war: “We're going into every game as a, as a battle, as a, as a battle and going to war,” says Tolini.

Good things come in threes, as Air Academy Head Coach Waymond Jackson is in his third year, where the program culture is starting to take shape: “I know it sounds cliché, but you have to trust the process and understand that it's a process and it's not going to happen overnight, right? So I don't trust the process to understand that it's going to happen. And when you get to year three, year 4 to 5, then you start seeing the results that you put in the works.”

The team’s mantra, kaizen, a term that means a change for the better, and the Kadets are looking to be better than last year, “Saying getting better every single day, 1% better at everything we do. And that's just kind of what we learned,” says Ballard.

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