The Year ‘Round Game

If you thought there was a gaping hole in a football player’s life between the end of spring practice and the beginning of drills in the fall then guess again.

At virtually every FBS (formerly Division 1A) school you’ll see most, if not all, of the squad on campus beginning in May when summer school begins and they’ll be there pretty much until Christmas break in December with brief gaps of time away here and there.

It’s a trend that’s kicked-in over the past 10 years.  Until then, it was a common ritual for players to arrive on campus with suitcases full near the end of July or in early August to go through the rigors of pre-season drills.  Only those who were way behind in hours, or on the brink of becoming academically ineligible, remained for summer sessions.

Now, for the most part, players probably never re-pack their heavy luggage until they’re leaving school for good.

With this phenomenon I’ve also noticed the growing trend of entire families moving to the town where their sons have gone off to play college football.

Think about it.  With the year-round commitment that it’s become, you may as well be no more than a couple of hours from your family because your time away from campus is so short that you don’t want to deal with long travel issues.

Clemson’s highly-regarded freshman quarterback Tahj Boyd’s family moved to Seneca from Virginia within days of his signing with the Tigers.  When Willie Korn signed two years ago out of Byrnes (about an hour from campus) his family still moved over to the Clemson area.

It’s become the new thing in college football, in particular.  Obviously, not all families are able to make such a move and no doubt this type of thing, like anything else in major college athletics, will likely draw the scrutiny of the NCAA.

The never-ending work toward the season is happening at the levels above and below college, as well.

The pros, as you might expect, no longer bid farewell to their teammates at the end of December or in January and come back for one mini-camp before summer training camp gets underway.

Their schedules are pretty much booked from late February through mid-June with OTAs (Official Team Activities) which are basically off-season practices that are mostly “volunteer” but few players get the sense that they are sessions they can miss, if you get my drift.

On the high school level, most every area team has begun taking part in seven-on-seven passing drills two nights a week and they’ll go deep into July.  In the meantime, teams will travel throughout the southeast or, in a few cases, to other parts of the country to take part in seven-on-seven tournaments.  They’ll also go to team camps for close to a week at a time.

Whether it makes the quality of the game better in the fall is anybody’s guess.  I would suppose the teams that do a lot of winning feel as if they’re getting a good benefit.  There are many that attend their fair share of the seven-on-sevens and end up having very little success.

But the last thing you want to do is walk off the field in the fall and wonder what might have been had you been hard at work in June.