The Combine Grind
Jeff Nelligan • Jul 27, 2019
Autumn starts where the summer grinds to an end -- on a green turf field crisscrossed by white lines. Have you ever noticed the sideline boundaries are always thicker than those measuring progress down field in yards? It’s too prosaic to contemplate -- or maybe not.
Summer of 2013 – the season of competition. Two sons, four athletic camps, and six tournaments stretching from Boston to Virginia Beach and seven cities in between. Forty-six officiated lacrosse games, more than 51 football skill sessions, 23 7-on-7 games, and at every one, the ever-present figure of good-natured Nellie, with free advice for all. For the eldest son, it’s a drive to be noticed and ultimately coveted by NCAA college coaches, no less in two sports. For the younger Boys’ Town grad, all fields are testing grounds of skill and athleticism to prevail over top talent in order to compete at the level where both of his older brothers now reside. Eldest son, the steady Nellie Junior, triumphed in this fast-paced crucible and is now playing college athletics.
Sports, kids – what I’ve seen this summer in 2,700 miles of driving from New England to the Old South is most of all the American Dad: indefatigable, generous, hopeful, persistent and always folding up the chair at the end of the day – yes, on those prosaic sidelines -- thinking about tomorrow’s 8 a.m. session and how the heck their kid can improve his performance.
The football camps are the notorious combines.” A hundred select young men, 400 non-select kids -- all instantly organized, sorted by primary position, offense or defense, and then given identifying jersey numbers. This is the wonderful mechanics of these camps. There is little discussion or confusion, just a quick following of orders and hustling to get in line.
Next comes the long and detailed regimen of workout drills watched by alert coaches with the Career Beginning and Ending Clipboards. Your kid does closely watched drills with, for example, dozens of Outside Linebackers. The coaches watch intently and dispassionately for hours, and what they write on the Clipboard means your kid may have a shot at their school, or it’s time to back home to Momma.
And they’re not asking for anything complex here. In fact, it’s simple and repetitive, just perfect for your correspondent. Bulky, leather practice bags are laid out and kids high-step through them. The bags are placed at oblique angles at various distances and kids high-step through them. Kids are thrown a ball as they run through the bags. They either catch it or keep high-stepping to the parking lot.
Four guys are placed in a square, a few yards apart from each other, and told to react to hand signals from a coach. Up, back, left, right. Stopwatches are everywhere.
Across three wide open fields these drills go on. Linemen push sleds, QBs and receivers and cornerbacks try to outwit each other. For running backs, it’s running through pads carrying the ball: “Nose to the sky!” “Eyes up!” “Back straight!” Then passing drills with QBs and linebackers: “Sharp routes!” “No cross overs!” “Burst! Burst!” The drills run for hours, yells floating across the fields like a long muted drone.
Every kid is trying their best, giving everything they have. They’re prepared. Just to get here has required thousands of hours of practice, weight rooms, hot fields, cold mornings, pass routes long after dusk, countless collisions and snap counts. What a remarkable set of circumstances has propelled them here. And it’s certainly not Real Life because there is not a single slacker to be seen.
And the parents. Imagine the sheer production of getting Billie from Nashville or Pittsburgh or Seattle or Houston or Miami all the way to Boston or Annapolis.
Having attended these camps and tourneys for years, I measure success by two critical lements: Foot speed and size. And you can’t teach size. The eldest son, Nellie Junior, no behemoth, worked for years on agility –ladders, the parachute, shuttle runs, endless sprints -- and became one of the quickest kids on any field on which he plays (Yeah, I’ll brag a bit. What are you going to do? Throw a clipboard at me?) The value of foot speed is inestimable. The coaches are entranced with it.
It takes about three reps of drills on day one, hour one, for someone to see where a kid stacks up. The competition is ferocious. It doesn’t mean a darn thing that you were All League at Big Bad High in the Tri-County Conference. Can you move out fast? How tall are you?
And last, and the coaches have a stock phrase when approached by a kid introducing himself: “Howareyourgrades?” It’s one word. It’s direct and hard, but hey, football is a direct and hard sport.
Little Nellie is 6’1”, 210 pounds, a linebacker who in addition, plays fullback and tight end. To really seal the deal, about three years ago, I encouraged him to take up and get good at long-snapping because as former football great, Richie Petibon, once told me,
“Snapping is THE tie-breaker.” I.e. if a kid can do that, and play one, even two more positions, he’s going to make a team over someone else.
So my son and I practiced snapping, and I mean endlessly. We’d have four footballs and he’d shoot them back to me, one after another, as I stood in punt formation. Then then he’d shoot them back to me as I simulated a holder and Boys’ Town son kicked, all to get the tempo and rhythm down right. It no doubt looked comical to folks coming across us on a field. We read up on hand placement on the ball, how to use the legs to increase ball speed. Over time, the snaps got faster, held a tighter spiral, and now Little Nellie is a machine.
And yes, if you really think hard about all this, you recognize instantly there’s a defining element of sheer madness. “Yes, I’m on annual leave from a serious job, driving 450 miles to watch my kid jump around bags and catch passes and push sleds all over a field –for eight hours.” Once, a well-meaning Dad on the sideline affably asked me about my son. I was distracted and said robotically,
“Punt snap average zero point seven, zero point five on PATs.”
It was 10:15 p.m. at the Princeton Camp, and the hotly contestd 7-on-7 games had ended. We’d arrived here about 20 hours ago from a lacrosse camp in Providence, RI. After 48 hours here, we’d split for a three-day Under Armour lacrosse tournament in Baltimore.
I was walking Little Nellie back to the dorm. He’s beat. Heck, I’m even beat from sitting in a chair all day and spinning college intrigues in my head.
We’re passing darkened classrooms and buildings and big lonely quads. “My man,” I say, “I know this a grind. But if you’re going to play college ball, this is where you gotta be.” He was carrying his shoulder pads and helmet, his hair was matted to his scalp, his shirt soaked with sweat and his cleats clicked and echoed on the pavement.
“Yeah Dad,” he said and then added, asking and answering a question at the same time, “Where else would I be?”
ABOUT THE BOOK
Every Dad in America wants to raise a resilient kid.
Four Lessons from My Three Sons charts the course.
Written by a good-natured but unyielding father, this slim volume describes how his off-beat and yet powerful forms of encouragement helped his sons obtain the assurance, strength and integrity needed to achieve personal success and satisfaction. This book isn't 300 pages of pop child psychology or a fatherhood "journey" filled with jargon and equivocation. It's tough and hard and fast. It’s about how three boys made their way to the U.S. Naval Academy, Williams, and West Point – and beyond.
"The day of days,,,"
Prepare your kid for the path, not the path for the kid.
"Don't ever be like that jackass."
Leave it to the eminent psychologist Ron “Jaws” Jaworski, B.A., Youngstown State, 1973, to define the essence of a confident worldview: “Facemask up!” It was his signature comment when talking about a pro quarterback leaving the pocket and instead of keeping his eyes up field to find the open receiver, was looking down at his feet as he ran. It’s a plain tale in a cluttered age and the meaning is simple: Be alert. Pay attention. Take in your surroundings. Examine and understand the landscape in front of you. Here’s one for the modern-age kid: Get your eyes off the glowing rectangle and absorb the world. The more one absorbs the world, the more confident one becomes. Because I have spent many years as an operative in the political realm, I’ve become skilled at helping principals navigate through individuals - five, fifty, five hundred - and I was keen on situational awareness. “SA” as the boys and I called it means eyes and ears focused; it’s about getting a feel for the dynamics of the people whom you are around, and the places in which you find yourself. I wanted them to have active minds that eschewed taking anything at face value, minds that really tried to understand the behavior and temperaments of their peers and the converse, total strangers. I wanted them to know how to handle themselves in the real world, in routine and unfamiliar circumstances. Here’s how the instruction began: When they were young – the eldest only nine-years old, the four of us were in a crowded department store where I had gone to buy a blazer. Standing here amidst the press of people, looking for a salesman, I told them in a whisper, which got their immediate attention, “Guys, I want you to watch this closely.” I carefully walked by several salespeople in the men’s clothing area, glancing back at the boys each time, then circled back past the fourth to a third guy. I got the answer and I help needed from him and came back to the boys. “OK boys, tell me what you saw.” They talked over each other about my walking around and passing by different clerks and then the middle kid spoke for all. “Why did you go to that guy? He wasn’t even next to the jackets.” “Here’s why, and pay attention. Everywhere you go, in every situation, you gotta look at people and figure them out fast.” Blank stares. I doggedly continued: “If you need some-thing, like I needed this blazer, you need to decide who is the best person to help you. I looked at the four sales guys – their clothes, the way they were standing, if they looked nice and smart, if they were smiling. Then I made my decision and chose that one man because I thought he would help me the most. Gents, you gotta read the crowd.” There was a faint glimmer of understanding, but there was a ways to go. How did I drive it home? Simple. I made them do it. Not long after, we were in the corridors of a big indoor mall. I took three $5 bills out of my wallet and handed one to each kid. “Here’s the deal. I want each of you to go into one of the stores along here and get change for the fiver. This isn’t a race. You have to go alone and then come back tell me about what you did.” Of course, I had their total attention. This was action on their part and they were excited. Yeah, I kept an eye on them, the youngest being five. Each one took off, navigating through shoppers, going into various stores, two striking out and coming back out and into other stores. They were overjoyed, to share their stories when they got back. We did this change-the-five deal often. There were other stunts. I’d have the 9-year-old go into a convenience store with cash – and some of these were rough-and-tumble places - to get beef jerky and Doritos. I’d pull into the parking lot of a carry-out restaurant and instruct the 8-year-old take our order, memorize it, and then go into the place and get it and pay for it. At airports, I put the eldest, then later the middle kid, in charge of getting boarding passes, either from a kiosk or handling everything with an agent while the rest of us stood by. At ages 11 and 10. All three sons soon became accustomed to this independence. They’d become totally engaged in these “tests” and after they’d be thrilled, as only young boys can be, to talk about their treks. By making it a game, I immediately won the boys’ participation. Fast forward: The eldest at age 15 is at big train station in New Jersey, confused about schedules and noise and surging people. He gets himself calmed down and starts looking around him and sees a kid carrying an orange duffle bag emblazoned with “McDonogh School Athletics.” My son has played against this school and thus feels comfortable in introducing himself to the kid and asking advice. It turns out the guy knows all about schedules and points s my son to the right train. The middle kid, not quite eight-years-old, is at a bowling alley and an arcade machine eats his money. He doesn’t lose his cool, loiters around, waits for the same thing to happen to an older kid and then discovers, by watching the older kid, who the attendant is in charge of fiddling with the machine and refunding the money. Virtually everywhere we went, from the most pedestrian places to the most exciting, we’d play the game. What do you see? Who is doing what? Who is hot and who is not? “Take in all the folks around you, measure them. Which one would you trust? Who is sketchy?” You need to impress upon your son these opportunities in the arena all around us. The youngest son, six-years old, is at a kids’ party at a big shopping mall, with a pair of hopelessly disorganized parents who drift away with a group of youngsters, leaving my boy and two other kids in the midst of a huge food court. You’re a Dad - you can only imagine the initial panic the kids felt when they realized they were alone. But aha, Nelligan Junior knows what to do. He recalls what I told him and his brothers once when we were in the surging crowds at a local college football stadium. “You guys are small so if you get lost somewhere in a bunch of people, look for that guy with a stripe running down their pants. That’s a policeman or a soldier and they’ll help out.” At the mall, my kid tells that to the two other kids and they stand for a few minutes, intently staring at passing legs.They see a mall security officer, who eventually links them up with the irresponsible parents. Self-assurance just doesn’t happen, it’s gained through encounters of all kinds. Whether it’s a group of four or a mob of several hundred, get them reading the crowd. Here’s a challenge to parents: Undertake one of the examples noted above – gently push your kid into a situation where he or she has to be alert and think on their feet in this everyday world around us all. You’ll be giving your child an inestimable lesson on the independence that creates a resilient kid.
"For goodness sake, I don't want the heel. "
"Yeah, it's the end of the world."
Prepare your kid for the path, not the path for your kid.
"Just get the ball to Louie!"
"I'll be waiting outside."
"If you're five minutes early, you're late!"