Upside down Football by Kluck Ted;

Author:Kluck, Ted;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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We are surrounded in the warehouse by a variety of vintage and modern training implements including rope ladders (for quick feet), tractor tires (for flipping), and giant, thick, nautical-type ropes (to build shoulder strength). These are the tools of the modern suburban trainer’s trade and the tools for which the modern suburban parent will pay top dollar. Owen shares the facility with a former Northern Illinois University (NIU) teammate turned speed coach.

Over the course of the next ninety minutes, Owen will take something that for me has always been about talent and feel, and make it scientific. At the Owen school of long snapping, there is a reason for everything that goes wrong in a long snap, and there is a way to fix it. Whereas before a coach would simply say, “Can anybody snap?” at the beginning of fall practice, today (theoretically) if one implements the physics involved in the Owen/Rubio methods, anyone can snap consistently every time.

We start with some simple catch drills (including one called the “forehead” drill), revealing that I’m not fully snapping my wrists at the end of each snap and so robbing my ball of precious spiraling rotations that keep it cutting through the midwestern wind and weather. “If you don’t go ‘fingertips to forearms’ your ball will wobble,” Owen explains. “There’s a lot going on with your hands,” he adds, meaning that there’s a lot that’s wrong.

Owen isn’t at all a jerk about any of this at all; he’s a really nice guy, and there is a ton that I still don’t know about snapping. But in football there is a de jure and de facto pecking order, and you have to achieve your way to the top of it. And until you do, you’ll probably be condescended to.

Football is all about hierarchies. It’s one of the most interesting aspects of guy-on-guy relationships: the pecking order and how certain guys always need to be at the top of it even though what they’ve done is already pretty impressive. Generally, I’m happy to let whomever I’m with sit atop whatever real or perceived pecking order exists in their mind. It’s just easier that way. Another guy-on-guy, competitive rhetorical device is asking questions to which you probably don’t know the answer, in order to reaffirm pecking order. Instead of just giving the information, a coach will sometimes frame it as questions, as if to remind me of all that I don’t know. It “works” in the sense that it does remind me that he is the expert, but still, it’s not exactly my favorite.

We then do a drill in which I deep-bend my knees twice before actually snapping—a motion that’s supposed to help my body remember to lock out my knees, thus providing maximum power. I can feel it working and feel the steps beginning to come together.

He sets up a camera and films me from three different angles, so that every bad snapping habit I have developed over thirty-plus years is laid out in painstaking, slow-motion detail.

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