The Combine Grind

Jeff Nelligan • July 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?”

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Flag duty and the end of 30 years in politics

By Jeff Nelligan • January 29, 2026

It's 8:30 a.m. on a humid August Tuesday and I’m on the roof of the U.S. Capitol, the Dome rising 280 feet directly above. In my arms is a stack of thin boxes and I’m navigating a plywood gangplank leading to a rusted 15-foot flagpole. A colleague joins me carrying more boxes. She opens one and hands me a 2’ by 4’ American flag which I affix to the pole’s lanyard, raise and lower quickly, unfasten and hand to her as she hands me another. A third colleague brings out more boxes and retrieves the ones containing flown flags. This little dance continues for three straight hours. Afterwards, my colleagues and I carefully re-fold each flag and affix to it a “Certificate of Authenticity from the Architect of the Capitol” reading “This flag was flown over the U.S. Capitol in honor of____” and fill in the blank: “The Greater Bakersfield, California Chamber of Commerce”…the 80 th birthday of Wilbert Robinson of Bowie, Maryland, proud veteran of the Vietnam War…” We will perform this task for five days a week until Congress returns from recess. This is my very first job in Washington, D.C. and obviously, I have what it takes. *** Flag duty began my 32-year run in politics and government, which ended last week. It included four tours of duty on Capitol Hill working for three Members of Congress, two Presidential appointments serving Cabinet officers in the Departments of State and Health and Human Services, posts at two independent agencies, and a career position at FDA. The jobs were a mix of purely political positions where being on the south side of an election meant cleaning out your desk and getting good at catchy LinkedIn posts – twice that happened - and career federal government stints where the stakes were less exhilarating. *** I worked principally as press secretary and special assistant. The former job, a common D.C. occupation, was transformed in 2008 with the onset of social media, morphing from daily pronouncements of your boss’s wisdom on the issues of the day to rapid-fire postings on the obvious unreasonableness, even cruelties of your opponents. Sound familiar? As for the latter occupational specialty, special assistant, the terms ‘bagman’ or ‘fixer’ are more apt: A guy always two steps behind the principal but always ready to step up and fix whatever problem arose in daily political life. Need a special vegan lunch for Congressman Busybody, White House tour tickets for the Big Bad High volleyball team, or the personal phone number of the executive assistant to a heavy-duty lobbyist? I was your guy. Every leader needs a fixer. Like anyone else who works in D.C., I occasionally participated in a glam political moment – you know, that unique, epic event that would never ever be forgotten in D.C. history Until it was. *** The best part about government life was working for many men and women who were at the top of their game in the D.C. Swamp, one of the toughest arenas on the planet. Their success, from the vantage point of your humble correspondent, was attributable to four simple rules of life. “If you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen.” Every office I was in kept metrics on virtually every aspect of the principal’s week – how many meetings and events attended, X posts, interviews, committee votes, constituent letters, action items completed from memos?! Numbers, numbers, and always keeping score – and always the quest to improve. “Never lose it.” In a lifetime of political jobs, I may have heard a boss raise her or his voice half a dozen times, even during and after major-league setbacks. Self-control was their hallmark. One boss, a powerful House Committee chairman once confided to me, “I’m fine that 80 precent of my job is humoring these guys, no matter how crazy they get.” An equally valuable corollary skill: Humility. The ability of these individuals to admit to colleagues and staff when wrong on a particular issue. Which counterintuitively only upped their long-term credibility. “Something’s always gonna go south.” Always the need for a plan C. Every initiative during an upcoming day was scoured for what elements would interfere and how, if they occurred, they could be ameliorated. Hence, in the rare times when things did go south, there was always preparation in advance for getting to 80 percent of what was needed. “Good is not good enough.” Successful politicians and government leaders – and their staffs – never get complacent. If they do, they’re not long for the Swamp. Everyone is always hustling for the edge. A useful corollary learned from an NCO when I was in the Army: Always have your hand up. Volunteering is at the heart of the hustle, the cheerful willingness to take on the new and unknown and do whatever it takes. *** And that’s how it all started. On the second day of my first congressional tour the Member solicited volunteers “for a fun recess job that’ll get you out of the office.” It was flag duty and from that day onwards my government career could only go up. *****