LINCOLN — Maybe it started with Brandon. Or Rex and Ben and Steven and Courtney and Will and even Taylor. Or just everybody.
The summer mantra for Nebraska's football team was this: No cliques. All in. Walk-ons and scholarships kids. Seniors and freshmen.
"One big team. It's just awesome," junior linebacker Will Compton said.
As it was for Lavonte and Kyler and Terrence and LeBron. Absolutely do not forget the assist of LeBron James and his Miami Heat to Nebraska's football team chemistry heading into 2011.
Summer is really no vacation for the Huskers. After a brief May break, a most physical school is in session in June and July, with strength and conditioning coach James Dobson walking between rows as lead drill instructor.
Hard-core weights in June. Gassers and sprints in July. Woven in is a vicious combo called "resistive conditioning," a circuit of power running with weights for a fixed period of time — that's longer than you'd ever prefer it.
"You really find out who someone is down deep by seeing them struggle and how they push through it," NU tight end Ben Cotton said.
Throw in volunteer film work — 25 plays a day, for example, for the linebackers — passing sessions, self-styled Big Ten prep and summer session university classes, and it's a grind. Teams need an escape.
Cue wide receiver Brandon Kinnie. We're away from home, he figured. Tired. Sore. When the dog days set in during spring camp, he'd invite some guys to eat wings or play laser tag. Kinnie's like that, a kind of team older brother. For summer, he wanted to organize a team barbecue. The idea: "Have fun, crack jokes, eat, and just have fun with each other." Maybe more than one cookout. So did senior tackle Terrence Moore and junior twins Steven and Courtney Osborne.
Kinnie went shopping for the food with quarterback Taylor Martinez and a few freshmen. Tons of players pitched in money.
"All of us took the lead on the bonding," Martinez said, interlocking his hands. "All of us did well together. The chemistry within a football team is the most important thing in how a team does."
They found a lake, cooked and ate as much as they could. Kinnie, Moore and tight end Kyler Reed did a lot of the cooking.
"We threw down!" Kinnie said, joking.
Kinnie started a brief-but-memorable trend of "planking," where a guy lays flat, with his hands to his side, on a surface and has his picture taken. Burkhead balanced himself on a goal post. Kinnie on a hoop. A couple offensive linemen went for two bathroom stalls.
Another weekend moment: NU players coasted down giant Slip-N-Slides placed on a hill. A few pictures showed up online. At Football 202 in late July, a Husker fan asked junior running back Rex Burkhead, with great seriousness, if he'd thought about what could have happened if some Husker got hurt.
Burkhead — smiling when others might have been incredulous — simply responded: "Well, most of us only went down one or two times."
During the week, the Huskers grinded away at Dobson's workouts. Freshmen are in their own group for class bonding while older guys divide into subsets. NU strength staff put running at a premium to help prepare for NU's high-tempo offense. Dobson managed the fierce July heat by occasionally moving workouts to the morning so as to avoid the 130-degree temperatures emanating from Memorial Stadium's turf.
Compton said the Huskers made "surprising" gains in the weight room, beyond the strength staff's expectations. Part of that was the team chemistry. The right weight room vibe.
It was subtly different in 2010. That was a big-but-young senior group full of guys who never redshirted and who, by last summer, knew it was Nebraska's final ride through the Big 12.
Players are loathe to hint at any perceived tension on last year's team, but Compton said this: "At times you'd sense different vibes from different players. Not always being on the same page — eventually getting on the same page. And it was nothing against our seniors. We had great seniors. It's just this year, everybody's on the same page."
Even when they're rooting for different basketball teams. The 2011 NBA Finals between the Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat was another central bonding moment. Lots of dudes rooted for Mavs, of course — it was practically a national pastime rooting against LeBron James — but the Heat had its contingency, too. Especially Miami native and senior linebacker Lavonte David.
"He's obsessed with the Heat," Compton said.
Cotton, another of those natural hubs of energy on the team, saw a young-but-confident team drawing closer together and he liked it. He doesn't want it to turn off heading into fall.
"It can never be enough tightly knit," Cotton said. "You can never stop growing in that area."
Contact the writer:
402-202-9766, sam.mckewon@owh.com
twitter.com/swmckewonOWH
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
RSS Feeds