He wanted excitement. He wanted leadership.

Mostly, the Colts’ head coach said he wanted to see signs that the team that won Super Bowl XLI last February was ready to begin looking toward the 2007 season. He wanted a rejuvenated team, one that was ready to work.

The verdict? Dungy liked what he saw.

“The tempo was really good,” Dungy said this week of the mini-camp, which ended Sunday with a pair of practices at the Colts’ practice facility.

“I could tell they were excited to get back to work. It went well. I was pleased with everything.”

Dungy spoke during a brief break in a busy early-week schedule.

Dungy, entering his sixth season as the Colts’ head coach, spent Friday and Saturday at mini-camp, then spent Sunday in Atlanta, where his daughter, Tiara, graduated from Spelman College.

He spent Monday and Tuesday in Nashville, Tenn., with the committee that presented the city of Indianapolis’ Super Bowl bid. There, he took a few minutes to discuss mini-camp, as well as the team’s summer-school session, which began on Tuesday and is scheduled to run through June 14.

The Colts’ rookies attended a three-day rookie mini-camp May 4-6 – a week after the NFL Draft – but this past weekend’s mini-camp was their first chance to work with the veterans. A primary objective was for the rookies to get further acclimated to the Colts’ methods, something Dungy said the veterans helped them accomplish.

“I thought our veterans did a great job of showing the rookies how we do things,” Dungy said.

The Colts’ off-season conditioning program began three weeks later than normal this off-season, something Dungy and Colts President Bill Polian planned to counteract a five-week postseason run that ended with Indianapolis’ 29-17 victory over the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLI.

The Colts have made the playoffs each of the past five seasons, extending the five seasons a total of 16 weeks. That’s nearly a full extra season over the period, and Dungy said the Colts are conscious of allowing players time to rejuvenate.

The hope, he said, also was that players would see other teams practicing and become anxious to return to work.

“That’s what I was hoping for,” Dungy said, “to give them some time off and let them really recover, but give them that energy to come back. That’s what we saw.”

Dungy said the same focus is necessary in the coming four weeks at the summer-school sessions – or organized training activities, as they are known in the NFL.

The Colts typically hold one of the NFL’s shorter training camps, which Dungy said makes summer-school sessions crucial. In Dungy’s five seasons, the Colts have started 4-1, 5-0, 4-1, 13-0 and 9-0, and Dungy said the focus in the OTA sessions are a big reason.

“It has become more and more important,” Dungy said. “You really are trying to get that edge, and you’re trying not to let training camp become a situation where you wear everybody down. For us, our summer school has been one of the reasons we got off to the good starts.

“We’ve done a lot of work, but we’ve been fresh when the regular season started, so it’s very important in my mind.”

Dungy also said despite a change in the preseason schedule, the training camp schedule in July and August will remain basically the same as past seasons. The Colts open camp at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute on July 29 and will break camp Sunday, August 19.

The end of camp is a day or two later than when the Colts normally have left Terre Haute under Dungy because the second preseason game is a Monday night game against Chicago at the RCA Dome on August 20.

“We’ve got a Thursday night and a Monday night game, so that’s going to alter some things, but our general way of doing things – we gave them the recovery time in the summer, so hopefully we can do the same thing,” Dungy said. “It’s a little different, because of the Monday-Thursday, and the days we had off, so all in all, I think it will turn out to be the same.

“If it’s not broke, don’t break it. I don’t want to be the one to break it.”