UNHWildCats
February 1st, 2008, 10:49 AM
Alone in the garage, calves screaming, the 16-year-old boy bounces grimly, tenaciously, into the night.
In a 3-by-2-foot box, with five dots arranged as you would find them on dice, he works through five simple drills: both feet forward then back, around the perimeter, the left foot first and then the right in a figure-eight pattern, a two-footed bunny hop all the way around, always facing forward and, finally, the bunny hop with a 180-degree hopscotch twist to bring it home.
He does the routine five times -- each takes just over a minute -- then pauses to catch his breath, hands on knees, gray T-shirt darkening at his heaving chest. His football coach in San Mateo, Calif., has told him the only thing separating him from a college football scholarship is agility and speed. This is the solution, the way to close that distance.
So Tom Brady does it again. And again. And …
"We created four stations in our weight room, but what made Tom different was that he took the template we had at school and created the same drill in his garage," explains Tom MacKenzie, then the coach at Junipero Serra High School, who developed the "dot drill" in 1993, before Brady's junior season there. "A lot of the things you see today -- his ability to extend plays by moving laterally, shuffling -- came from mastering that drill.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs07/columns/story?id=3219092&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab2pos1
In a 3-by-2-foot box, with five dots arranged as you would find them on dice, he works through five simple drills: both feet forward then back, around the perimeter, the left foot first and then the right in a figure-eight pattern, a two-footed bunny hop all the way around, always facing forward and, finally, the bunny hop with a 180-degree hopscotch twist to bring it home.
He does the routine five times -- each takes just over a minute -- then pauses to catch his breath, hands on knees, gray T-shirt darkening at his heaving chest. His football coach in San Mateo, Calif., has told him the only thing separating him from a college football scholarship is agility and speed. This is the solution, the way to close that distance.
So Tom Brady does it again. And again. And …
"We created four stations in our weight room, but what made Tom different was that he took the template we had at school and created the same drill in his garage," explains Tom MacKenzie, then the coach at Junipero Serra High School, who developed the "dot drill" in 1993, before Brady's junior season there. "A lot of the things you see today -- his ability to extend plays by moving laterally, shuffling -- came from mastering that drill.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs07/columns/story?id=3219092&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab2pos1