Located 20 minutes east of Payson, Arizona, Tontozona is not only typically 15-20 degrees cooler than Tempe, but also offers a break from the team’s typical routine.

However, conducting training camp away from campus is not something all programs choose to do.

Redshirt junior cornerback Javan Robinson said training camp at his former school, Washington State University, was utterly different from how the Sun Devils do things.

“We didn’t do anything like this,” Robinson said. “We stayed at the facility most of the time, but our days were longer, like we would be at the facility from like seven in the morning to ten at night,” and added on that many of his teammates slept in the locker rooms because they “didn’t have time to go home.”

Robinson, who was a redshirt sophomore at the time, felt uncomfortable during his first trip to Tontozona a season ago, as not even trees brought a sense of comfort.

Like Robinson, star redshirt-sophomore quarterback Sam Leavitt felt discomfort the first time experiencing Camp Tontozona; however, his focus at the time wasn’t set on camp itself.

“Last year at this time, I was still fighting for a job, I was still competing with Jeff [Sims],” Leavitt said. “I had a lot of belief in myself, not a lot of people had a lot of belief in me leading up to this point, so it’s a different outlook.”

Unlike Robinson, Leavitt said the trees comforted him, reminding him of his home in Oregon. 

Leavitt said he sat on the field for an hour Tuesday night, reflecting on how much life had changed for him in the last year— going from battling for the starting quarterback position to being a potential Heisman candidate. 

Junior running back Kanye Udoh said he also felt a sense of familiarity in the trees following his time at West Point in New York; yet, like Robinson’s experience at WSU, his former program did not travel for training camp. 

“At the Army during fall camp, we all slept at the facility in bunk beds,” Udoh said. “That’s the little similarity [to Camp Tontozona].”

At most college programs, training camps are a straight grind, as Robinson described from his experience at Washington State. Conversely, Arizona State takes a different approach, focusing on building relationships with everyone in the program. 

“Up here is where you really get to know things about your guys,” Arizona State head coach Kenny Dillingham said. “We have fire pits at night and talk about yourself, what your why is, kind of go in depth about what makes you you, what makes you tick, what your biggest obstacles are in life.”

ASU offensive coordinator Marcus Arroyo, who has been a part of multiple winning programs, such as the 2019 Rose Bowl Champion Oregon Ducks and last year’s Big 12 Champion Sun Devils, believes that a significant part of successful teams is the relationships between the players and coaches. 

“I’m still sometimes taken aback by how many people haven’t created that opportunity,” Arroyo said. “It’s times like this that I tell these guys, there's a reason why we were pretty successful in last year’s campaign. In my opinion, it’s because of the time we spent together, I think it’s a huge piece of it.”