Young football players sharpen skills at Football University camp

Clayton Ford snatches a football off the quarterback tee, shuffles his feet backward a few times and throws an out route. Ford, a gangling Congress Middle School eighth-grader from Kansas City, smiles watching his throw spiral toward the sideline.

“That was pretty good,” Ford thinks to himself, smiling, exposing his braces.

But Shawn Moore is quick to bring Ford back to earth.

First, Moore wants Ford to put his thumbs together when grabbing the ball off the tee.

“Don’t just grab it,” Moore says. “You’re supposed to be taking a snap from center, so get those thumbs together.”

Moore then tells Ford to get deeper with his five-step drop.

“With those long legs, you should be able to get back 7 yards easy,” Moore says.

Moore compliments Ford’s release, which used to be a sidearm delivery but now comes over the top, but he wants to see more follow-through.

“Remember,” Moore says, “we want that right thumb to go into the left pocket.”

Such is life at Football University, which conducted one of the 32 three-day camps it is host to nationwide last weekend at William Jewell College.

At first blush, the idea seems insane: national all-star football camps and games for players as young as seventh grade. Pure madness, right? The kids are too young, the grinding of the hype machine now arriving too soon.

But Rich McGuinness doesn’t see it that way.

The president of SportsLink Inc., a sports-marketing company based in New Jersey, and founder of the U.S. Army All-American Bowl, the premier national high school all-star game for seniors, McGuinness insists that Football University and Youth All-American Bowl might actually be overdue.

The U.S. Army All-American Bowl will celebrate its 10th season in January. It boasts Vince Young and Reggie Bush among its alumni, but organizers also noticed a disturbing trend in the early years of the East-vs.-West game.

“We had a lot of guys who would show up and they were physical freaks, but technically deficient,” McGuinness says. “We had a generation of football players forgetting technical ability.”

Too fast, too strong and too big for opponents at home, the players occasionally would wilt when finally facing other players of equal talent. The solution was to start Football University, FBU for short, three years ago.

“There is an outlet in America for just about everything if a young person shows skill at something at an early age,” McGuinness says. “Ironically, there wasn’t really one for football.”

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FBU comes with a hefty price tag: $549 for the weekend camp — or roughly $40 per hour of instruction. Billed as “by position, by professionals, by invitation only,” organizers defend the cost by insisting it’s training not available elsewhere.

The instructors at each position group are primarily former NFL or NCAA Division I players such as Moore, who played five NFL seasons and also enjoyed a stint in the CFL after a standout career at Virginia.

In addition to the on-field drills and instruction, there are film-study sessions that break down a player’s mechanics point by point, helping them further refine technique and — hopefully — improve performance.

“You can learn a tremendous amount even in a short time,” says Vin Siciliano, the head coach and director of operations for FBU. “We’ve got some of the top NFL instructors who played the game at the highest level you can play. The chance to have those guys teach you the fundamentals is a great experience for the kids to get some tools they can use throughout the year.”

But is it worth it? Olathe East coach Jeff Meyers has his doubts.

“The bottom line is that if you are one of the top athletes, you’re going to get noticed,” Meyers says. “It’s a promotional deal. They are trying to build their camps and make people think it’s the thing to do. You see it a lot with recruiting, where somebody is always willing to take your money.”

Still, Meyers doesn’t mind the camps — even if he doesn’t consider them necessary.

“Football has always just been thought of as a fall sport,” he says. “It’s kind of been on its own and not had to do some of these other things, but we’re losing kids to other activities that take place year-round now.”

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Baseball, softball, soccer, tennis, golf — name any sport aside from football and there is an organization promoting and teaching it 12 months a year. Now, football has its own equivalent.

“We’re real proud of what we’ve built,” McGuinness says. “We had a few people questioning whether it’s too young, too soon, and that’s part of a valid debate.”

But he defends FBU, likening it to advanced placement classes for students with, for example, high math aptitude. Besides, no one complains about the Little League World Series, training at Mac-N-Seitz or the countless, massive regional soccer tournaments.

“We looked at the landscape and decided we wanted to be the Bollettieri Tennis Academy for football,” McGuinness says. “We tried to build an academy model that reached the top 5 or 10 percent before they were juniors or seniors and came to the Army All-American Bowl. We wanted to start identifying the best kids in seventh and eighth grade and start giving them this high-level instruction earlier.”

The Football University Youth All-American Bowl, which played its first three-game series with weight-limit games for seventh- and eighth-graders as well as an unlimited-weight game for eighth-graders in January at the Alamodome in San Antonio in conjunction with U.S. Army All-American Bowl, was a natural extension of that, McGuinness says.

“When you meet the next Darren Sproles of Kansas City, you want to provide a showcase for that,” McGuinness says. “We had trained all these kids and thought, wouldn’t it be great to get all these kids together on the same field and give them a big-game experience against other kids who are nationally recognized.

“It’s not trying to suggest these guys are Pro Bowlers for the next 15 or 20 years. We met them, trained them and said, ‘Gee, why don’t we give them a forum to strut their stuff a little.’ ”

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Ford played in the inaugural seventh-grade game. He’s still a year away from playing for Park Hill High School but was selected for the Youth All-American Bowl after attending his first FBU last year in Chicago.

“I was surprised to be invited to that game,” Ford says. “I thought I was good, but not good enough to be one of the top 40 kids selected for the game in the nation. But it was a good experience. It makes you feel like a professional player. It’s just an awesome experience.”

Ford doesn’t think it’s ever too early to learn the right way to play the game.

“You’ve got to be a sponge and soak up everything you can,” Clayton Ford says. “And I think it’s easier to learn when you’re younger, because the kid doesn’t have an attitude yet and doesn’t have as many bad habits.”

His father, Robert, also soaks in every hour of the FBU experience, watching Clayton from the sideline. Obviously, Robert Ford has no problem with giving his son an edge at an early age.

“What he loves doing is football,” Robert Ford says. “It’s got a price tag, but he learns a lot from it. The one-on-one training and learning from pros, just the knowledge he can get from people who’ve played the game is hard to find.”

He isn’t worried about the hype and expectations that comes along with the FBU experience and being chosen a national all-star at so young an age.

“I don’t know if there’s a danger in it, but I don’t think it hurts to set goals,” Robert Ford says.

“My dream is for him to play in college. His dream is to go to the NFL, but if he can go play in college and get an education playing the game he loves, I’ll be happy.”