I was in my senior season at the University of Miami.\u00a0 As luck would have it,\u00a0 the Super Bowl was in Miami that year.\u00a0 The San Diego Chargers were taking on the San Francisco 49ers.\u00a0 Even more luck was upon me as the 49ers were using our facilities to prepare for the big game.\u00a0 What I learned from that experience stayed with me for a lifetime.<\/p>\n
We weren’t allowed to see the 49ers practice as those things,\u00a0 for the most part,\u00a0 were top secret.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 on one day,\u00a0 a couple of us players stepped into our head coach’s office where we could see the practice field.\u00a0 Already legendary for his work ethic,\u00a0 I expected to see Jerry Rice working up a sweat.\u00a0 I did not expect to see a maniac.\u00a0 Rice sprinted to the end zone on every pass he caught and as you could imagine,\u00a0 he was thrown many of them.\u00a0 He would then turn around and run back down to catch his next rep.\u00a0 When the first team came out,\u00a0 guys grabbed Gatorade.\u00a0 Rice grabbed a trainer who threw him balls continuously until the first team was back in again.\u00a0 It was insane to watch.\u00a0 Rice was in his 11th year as a pro and nowhere close to getting cut but was behaving like he was told he was on the chopping block.<\/p>\n
Working almost as hard on the defensive side of the ball was Deion Sanders who was then a 49er.\u00a0 Sanders would sprint to the other side of the field on a run play and get back to his spot for the next play.\u00a0 This was the king of coverage making sure he was where he needed to be on a run play.\u00a0 When the horn sounded to change periods,\u00a0 both Sanders and Rice would sprint to the next field they were required to be on for the ensuing period.\u00a0 Two future Hall of Famers,\u00a0 blessed with God given ability in bunches,\u00a0 not taking anything for granted.\u00a0 I left our coach’s office saying the 49ers by 50! There was no way the Chargers could contend with a team where the two best players worked as hard as this.<\/p>\n
As I have reflected on that day throughout the years,\u00a0 I am reminded of the cost there is to achieve a goal.\u00a0 The greater the goal,\u00a0 the greater the cost.\u00a0 Over my time as a coach,\u00a0 I witnessed many a kid earn a football scholarship but many more who didn’t.\u00a0 At times,\u00a0 I have seen those who didn’t,\u00a0 perhaps out of jealousy,\u00a0 throw shots at those who did.\u00a0 “Oh he’s just tall” “He just had good genes.” “He’s just fast”.<\/p>\n
When I hear those things,\u00a0 I just think of two of the best athletes the NFL has ever had,\u00a0 busting their tail to be the best.\u00a0 \u00a0There’s a cost to be a college football prospect.\u00a0 It means intense weight training.\u00a0 This means constantly trying to add more weight to the bar and surpass today what you did yesterday.\u00a0 It also means doing more than what the coach wrote on the board as today’s workout.\u00a0 It means doing pushups and lunges at home while others are playing Playstation.<\/p>\n
When everyone else is pacing themselves through a conditioning workout,\u00a0 a college prospect is probably running at a faster pace even though, like everyone else,\u00a0 he really doesn’t want to.\u00a0 A college prospect is getting some extra running in too most likely on the weekend,\u00a0 at night or even bright and early in the morning. He’s doing this while others are enjoying their Saturdays and Sundays or laying in bed late.<\/p>\n
Speaking of Saturdays and Sundays,\u00a0 those times are made for rest and relaxation.\u00a0 That is not the case if you are a serious college football prospect.\u00a0 Your weekends are made for running and extra position work.\u00a0 That prospect is either playing another sport,\u00a0 at a track meet or playing in a 7on7 tournament often out of town.\u00a0 If he’s not doing that,\u00a0 he’s working with a trainer to raise his level of play.\u00a0 This is going on while you are at the mall or on the yacht or at the beach.<\/p>\n
You know how you go on a vacation with the family to some European destination,\u00a0 historical American city,\u00a0 lovely mountain or fun lake in the summer? Not the college football prospect.\u00a0 To earn the scholarships he wants,\u00a0 he’s going on a tour of colleges to participate in their camps against 100’s of others trying to catch the eye of the college football coach.\u00a0 He’s in the sun,\u00a0 sweating it out,\u00a0 pushing and pulling against another athlete willing to die for an offer.\u00a0 Around the time you are on the boat making a tight turn around the buoy in the lake laughing with friends,\u00a0 the college prospect is bending around a sweaty offensive tackle grunting to bury his face in the turf.<\/p>\n
In the midst of all this extra work,\u00a0 that legit college prospect must find time to focus on and complete his classwork to maintain the required GPA so that he can even accept a college football scholarship when it is offered.\u00a0 I played major college football and for national championships.\u00a0 I myself was a guy who had pride in putting in extra work.\u00a0 Even still,\u00a0 I was shocked at how hard Rice and Sanders worked.\u00a0 So when I write this,\u00a0 I am not writing it to the common student (though the message is for you too if you like to criticize athletes).\u00a0 I am writing to you guys on the football team who bitch about not getting a scholarship and think the guys who did EARN them got them by being lucky.\u00a0 You thought the bare minimum was enough.\u00a0 You were wrong.\u00a0 You thought just practicing and playing the game was enough. You were wrong.\u00a0 You thought that you could play ball,\u00a0 sacrifice nothing and still get what the next man got.\u00a0 Again,\u00a0 you were wrong.\u00a0 Each year over 300,000 people want what you want.\u00a0 If you thought it was going to be easy,\u00a0 I’m here to tell you one more time,\u00a0 you are wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was in my senior season at the University of Miami.\u00a0 As luck would have it,\u00a0 the Super<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":4015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[995],"tags":[881,1007,1011,822,689,1010,1008,1009],"class_list":["post-4014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recruiting-tips","tag-college-coaches","tag-college-football-prospect","tag-conditioning","tag-offers","tag-recruiting","tag-running","tag-summer-camps","tag-weightlifting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}