The Freshman Football Player

Questions Galore

As a former football player, I am often asked about some of the different aspects of college football that people aren’t directly exposed to. A player’s perspective is often quite different than that of a coach or fan and this is likely the reason that fans have so many questions about what’s going on.

Many times, the questions they ask are rhetorical. The person asking believes that something is so and they are looking for what could be called “confirmation bias” in your answer. When this is the case, I usually just nod in agreement. There’s no sense arguing with someone about whatever preconceived notion they have about something they don’t want your answer about anyway. So yeah, whatever. You’re right. You win.

Other times, people do seem to be interested in what you have to say, and I don’t mind answering those questions at all. These folks generally have a modicum of appreciation for the fact that you have done something that they haven’t, and they like the feeling of knowing what you know.

Some of the questions I get are really general in nature, such as “What’s it like to run out of the tunnel at the Vaught?” (By the way, it’s freaking awesome!)

Others can ask very specific questions, like “What is <insert coach/player name> like in person?” – These questions can be a bit tricky depending on who it is and how the person asking the question knows them. In this day and age, people are constantly trying to bait you into saying something bad about someone else, so you have to be extra careful in how you respond.

A really popular question I get this time of year is, “So what’s it like going through fall practice with the team?”

Many people think it’s fun. Others think it’s terrible because it’s so damn hot in August.

The truth is that it’s a lot of both.

Here’s my attempt at describing your average, run-of-the-mill player experience coming out of high school and going through his first workouts and practices with the team.

Senior Year Finale

The world of college football recruiting is absolutely insane. It is the ultimate dog and pony show with the ultimate slap in the face of an ending. Allow me to explain.

Imagine being wined and dined for the better part of two years as your junior and senior years of high school go by. Schools from all over the country are calling on you repeatedly to get their pitch in about why their school is the one for you.

For some of the higher-rated players, it gets so time consuming that you have to use your high school coaches and family members to shield you from all the calls. You can end up looking a little bit like a prima-donna if you aren’t careful. This is only because you want to get a little peace from all the recruiting insanity and have a normal high school experience.

The attention is fun at first and certainly has its advantages, but after a while it just gets monotonous and annoying. Especially after you have committed somewhere or already know where you’re going to go.

Eventually, you make your decision, sign on the dotted line and collect a smattering of hugs, handshakes and pats on the back from a bunch of people you barely know.

You finish out your senior year and get a couple weeks off to party before heading to college to prepare for summer workouts and begin that college career.

You hit campus and everything looks hunky-dory. Students are everywhere going about their business and the majority of them don’t even know who you are. It’s not like high school where everyone was always saying hello, even if you didn’t know who they were.

At college, it’s the opposite. You’re nobody yet, and it seems kind of cool. You get the occasional head nod from passing gentlemen, of course, but more as a sign of respect than anything else. The ladies will say hello in passing as well but only because they know you play football. – You’re twice the size of everyone else. Of course they know you play football!

You make a couple of friends, maybe go out to eat or to the bookstore or whatever. You’re free to do what you want, when you want. It’s awesome to be a college football player, right!?!

Then the anti-climax comes. Brace for impact.

The First Workout

As soon as you walk into the weightroom at your first workout, you’re pumped. You’ve been wanting the college football life for a while now and it’s time to get to work. The nervous energy keeps you going…for a few minutes, anyway. 

After some stretching and warm-up exercises, the reality starts to set in. You suddenly realize that you are not the largest or strongest person in the room. In fact, you feel kind of small when compared to the other players. These are grown-ass men and they are throwing iron around like it’s nothing.

Coaches and other staff members are yelling and screaming at the players too. It strikes you as extremely odd because they all seemed so nice on your official visits.

A workout that would normally take you 2 hours to complete at home is done in 50 minutes. It only took that long because you spent 10 minutes in the bathroom. Apparently, vomiting from lifting weights is a thing here. Who knew?

Despite the sense of relief that the workout is over, you now feel more fatigued than ever. You pushed less weight with fewer reps than everyone else in your group and you feel like you’re the only one who’s exhausted.

The next workout is scheduled for that evening, so you go back to your dorm room, take a quick shower and collapse onto your bed. Some players skip the shower entirely. Yeah, seriously.

The Second Workout

Your plan was to sleep for an hour or so, go get some lunch, then go hang around upstairs at the Student Union and play some pool. You wake up an hour later and roll over to see the time. The soreness from the workout is beginning to set in and you decide that you’ll rest just a few more minutes.

The next time you roll over, four hours have gone by and you’ve only got 90 minutes left until the evening workout begins. You hastily make your way back across campus, grab a quick lunch and then get to the fieldhouse with almost 45 minutes before the next workout is scheduled.

The only problem is that some players took it upon themselves to start the next workout two hours early. No one told you, and now you feel like a fool on top of everything else. After a little running, you have to throw up again because you ate only 20 minutes ago. So much for that $15 hamburger.

Thirty minutes later, the coaches show up and everything gets a lot more organized really quickly. These dudes are all about getting as much work done as possible in the allotted time. Efficiency is paramount.

You immediately begin to run through a gamut of footwork, speed and agility drills that you’ve done a million times. 

The only thing is, you’re now being told that you are doing the drills all wrong. You use the wrong foot to step with. You stand up too quickly. You don’t know how to shuffle your feet properly. Your stance is dog excrement. Your hands are too high. You breathe wrong…that’s right, I didn’t know how to breathe properly.

You’ve never in your life heard a football coach talk about angles and sight lines and step numbers while simultaneously screaming at you to go faster. It’s hard to think your way through it all and that just slows you down anyway.

No matter how hard you try, the legs just don’t seem to come up and down as quickly as you remember from high school. You’re holding the drills up because you are so slow and you can feel the other players laughing at you. The head coach quickly picks you out of the crowd and reminds everyone of how slow you look. It ain’t a pretty sight.

That night, your parents are able to convince you on the phone that things will get better after the first day of workouts and that you should give it a few more days before deciding to quit. This phone conversation will repeat itself a few more times over the next couple of weeks, then again in your third and fourth years.

Fall Arrives

Miraculously, you make it through two workouts per day through the summer. You are rewarded with getting to go home a week before fall practice is scheduled to start. When you get there, every single person you run into comments about how great you look. When you finally get a minute to relax and look in the mirror, you see that the workouts have been good for you. You do look better. You feel like you’re in shape.

The friends and family start talking about how you’ll probably get to play as a freshman since you have done so well over the summer. You don’t bother mentioning to them the grown-ass men that you’ve been chasing in every workout and drill since you got there.

When you get back to start fall practice, it feels like a do-over. You’re more prepared and ready to take on the world of college football. 

Then everything comes crashing down on you again.

The first two weeks of fall practice are an undeniable, excruciating trip to hell and back.

You learned how to work hard at summer workouts, but this was a completely different animal. The coaches push you well beyond your capacity. You are so mentally and physically exhausted after every practice that the coaches have to force you to eat more so that your body can keep up with your caloric needs. Quitting enters the mind of every athlete on the field. Well, maybe not every athlete, but a lot of them.

I can’t begin to tell you how hot you get during these two weeks. There are no words to describe it adequately. It feels like someone took one of those Carolina Ghost Reaper peppers and put it into a spray can and sprayed your entire body with it. You, literally, sweat from head to toe. It’s 96 degrees outside and the heat index is at 110. Each day you pack on 10 pounds of pads and a helmet and then run until you fall over vomiting. Try breathing then. I can’t even think about it.

You actually feel bad for the freshmen who didn’t make it up for summer workouts.

After your practice in the morning sauna, you get to shower off and go through freshmen orientational meetings until lunch time. This is where they teach you how to act in public, how to organize for your classes, how to be respectful of women, how to do an interview, etc. I think the real point of the orientation is to get you to stay as far away from trouble as possible.

After lunch, you go to an offensive or defensive meeting, then positional meetings, then another offensive/defensive meeting to make sure you didn’t miss anything the first time. These meetings are really where you learn about football and how it’s supposed to be played. You get to see film of your practice from the day before and the coaches get to point out to you exactly where you are doing things right and wrong.

After the last meeting, you go get taped up again for evening practice. The evening practices are usually team-oriented stuff, so there’s not as much running as in the morning time. Lot’s of yelling, mind you, but not as much running. Despite that, you still end up sweating out a gallon of salt water.

Hell Cometh To An End

The third week of fall practice is actually moderately enjoyable. You’re in the best shape your body has ever seen and, aside from some running, you enter what the coaches call “maintenance” workouts. That means you start lifting weights again after three weeks off, but now you are only aiming to maintain the strength you’ve built through the off-season.

Much of the practice now shifts to game-planning and refining the offensive and defensive schemes that were installed over the last couple of weeks. The coaches are suddenly nice again (since recruiting season is about to start), and the rest of fall practice rolls by without many issues. Quite frankly, most players are chomping at the bit to play a game at this point. It’s all the coaches can do to keep them from injuring each other or themselves.

Classes also begin at the end of the third week so you get a little more time to yourself. You have mandatory study halls and if you plan well, you can get most of your schoolwork and studying done there. That leaves you with the rest of the time to do what you want, although most of the athletes end up going everywhere together because those are just the people they know.

It’s nice to start getting more interaction with normal people who aren’t obsessed with football, until you realize that everyone there is obsessed with football. You DID decide to sign with an SEC school…and football is really all they think about.