The Rookies

Note: This picture has nothing to do with Cool.

Our resident jock, CoolHWhip, once described himself as a “smart football player,” comparing the rarity of his combination of athletic talent and Star Wars love to a unicorn. He remains perhaps the nerdiest jock in The Rookies’ collective memory, playing quarterback for (college redacted) in (state redacted). The Chronicles of Nerdia will take you through his football life, and probably feature Paul Rudd in 93% of the posts. Enjoy.

Training camp:  The beginning of football season, which blessedly breaks up the endless baseball highlights (NTTATWWT) and the Favre-Vikings-Everyone Else In The NFL orgy. Training camp is loved by fans of all levels of the game of pigskin, people from all walks of life.

Ah yes, training camp. So many memories.

Training camp can go fuck itself.

Training camp was established to get players back into shape after they had a long off-season back home doing God knows what. Now, that has mushroomed into winter conditioning, spring ball, and “voluntary” summer workouts.

I am not complaining about any of these things, but the whole idea of all day-sessions involving meeting after meeting and long 26-period practices in the middle of summer heat was instituted to whip men who had been doing their own training back into “football shape”. It’s far less necessary now: College players are now working out daily, plus other extra activities like 7-on-7 and individual time with teammates.

It won’t change the boot camp-like sessions that I am about to partake in. Sure, they may be less vital than they once were, but there is no way that anyone is going to say, “You know what? You guys have worked hard, we’re going to take it slow during camp and have long walk-through sessions before putting you into pads in the second week and then putting more advance stuff in.” Nope. Coaches can’t wait to get guys in the pads and hitting and wearing them out and playing good ol’ smashmouth football.

The hardest part about the quarterback position, though, is the mental aspect. Learning an encyclopedia in a couple weeks while on little sleep and in-between long practices leaves me mentally, as well as physically, drained. My old school would throw the quarterbacks into tackling drills, which are never fun for anyone, much less the poor little shrinking violets who have rules designed to protect them.

Hopefully, my new school will treat us like the beautiful little babies that we are.

Sorry. I just needed to vent a little bit after sitting in nearly six hours of meetings today, going through goals for the team, ways to push yourself, what to get out of camp, etc. and then capping that off with an hour more with our position coach that was almost like a blur of jargon. Tribe Lion Zulu Kill Back Zebra, anyone? I felt like I had a good grasp of the first little meeting considering it was more or less my first time going over this stuff.

It is going to be an interesting three weeks.

I am not going to try and give everyone a tell-all Ball Four-type thing here, but I’ll be keeping some notes on the day-to-day happenings that I go through as I make my way through another year of American Foozball. Check back later this week for more tales from the Chronicles of Nerdia.

…eh, why not?