Ford Swaps Frustration for Focus
October 24, 2017
By Tim Robinson
Special for Second Half
Midway through the 2016 season, Marcus Ford was frustrated.
He was on the Pinckney football team, but not playing much.
A big part of that was due to his size — 6-foot-5 and over 400 pounds — but then-defensive coordinator Rod Beaton sensed there was more.
“We feel that we coach very hard,” said Beaton, now Pinckney’s head coach. “We’re very aggressive (on the varsity), and sometimes it’s an adjustment for juniors to understand that when they come out here, there’s expectations.
“There were a couple times where Marcus was questioning … whether football was for him.”
“I didn’t want to be there,” Ford said. “I thought, ‘This is stupid. Why am I here so late?’”
And then came a change.
“It came to a point where he went home and took a day off to re-gather himself,” Beaton said. “Marcus came back and he said to me, ‘Coach, I really want to be a part of things here.’”
And Ford did more than that.
He grew from a young man who bristled when his coaches pointed out mistakes to one who doesn’t react as if it were a personal attack, from an overweight kid who admits he was on his way to weighing 600 pounds to a big kid who is a key part of Livingston County’s most successful football team as a senior.
He rarely comes out of games, his coach says, and the quiet giant who rarely interacted with his teammates has transformed into a happy, smiling kid who dishes out and takes teasing from them.
It’s a story of transformation that only football could have done for Marcus Ford, who couldn’t play youth football because of his size and whose options for high school athletics seemed limited to football for the same reason.
“I may sound a little clichéd and corny,” Beaton said, “but I think this is why every single coach in America coaches football, to watch the development of a young man, from freshman to sophomore to junior and to see what football has done for him.”
How did Ford do it?
He turned his mental approach 180 degrees and made drastic changes to his diet and work ethic.
One clue came in looking at Pinckney’s roster from 2016 compared to 2017. Last year, Ford was listed at 380, which was about 40 pounds less than his actual weight.
This year, he’s listed at 405, which is a dozen pounds more than what he weighs now.
Last year, he played mostly in mop-up roles.
This year, he is a starter on defense, regularly occupying two blockers at a time, which in turn frees linebackers Cauy Hendee and Levi Collins to make tackles.
“I can play a lot longer,” he said. “I was tired when we were out there, but we don’t believe in the word ‘tired.’ We prefer ‘winded.’ We just need to catch our breath. So I get ‘winded’ a lot less.”
The first thing Marcus decided to change was his diet, and he got his cues by looking in the mirror.
“I didn’t like the muffin cap that was hanging down,” he said. “I didn’t like my stomach hanging over. ... I thought, ‘I don’t what to have a heart attack at age 25.’ I was doing ‘diets,’ per se, but eventually I thought, ‘This is stupid. Cut out pop and eat better,’ And I did.
“The only thing I would eat that was green was green beans, and they had to be made a certain way,” he said. “Now, I’m more like ‘this is somewhat appetizing. Let me try that.’ I don’t eat candy bars anymore. I don’t eat ice cream when my family does. I drink a lot less milk than I used to, and I drink more water.”
Pinckney offensive coordinator Cody Patton noticed.
“His mom came to me about getting a weight plan, and he stuck with it,” Patton said. “They can only do so much in the weight room. When they leave, there’s not much you can control what they put into their bodies.”
But Ford also changed his mindset about football and being coached.
“His first real commitment was ninth-grade high school football, and it was a big adjustment for him,” Beaton said. “We knew there would be days where he might be a little confrontational, there may be some days where he goes through the motions.”
But after that midseason meeting last year, Ford redoubled his efforts in practice and in the offseason.
The first hint that he was a different player came in June, when Ford earned the team’s first bone helmet sticker of the season for effort in a drill.
“It was our first pursuit drill,” Beaton said. “We go four downs, and those kids have to sprint. There’s no exception. Marcus stepped to his gap, made his reads, flew to the football and didn’t say a word, every single time. He did it four times in a row. It really set the stage. I could tell he was wanting do to things right this year.
“When you see a 6-5, 400-pound kid moving with effort and tenacity, you sit there and go, ‘That young man can help us.’”
And so he has.
As a result, Marcus Ford is part of a Pinckney defense that has lifted the Pirates to an 8-1 regular-season record and shared Southeastern Conference White championship. He has transformed from a player who had little stamina to one who can go from opening kickoff to final horn.
“He can play a whole football game,” Beaton said. “He can go through a whole practice. One of the challenges we were talking about in the offseason is he has to put his body and mind in a position to not come off the field.”
That moment came on a warm night early in the season.
“We were in a huddle at Chelsea, and it was late,” Beaton recalled. “He’s drenched in sweat, and I said, ‘Marcus, you need a breather?’ And he said, ‘No, coach. I’m ready.’ That’s pretty cool.”
Asked his ideal weight, Ford said, “I would like to be at 250 if I could,” then laughs. His bone structure is such that at his height, he would be almost gaunt at 250. “I would settle for 340. That’s the dream within a dream goal.”
Next year, he plans to attend college.
“I want to go into bartending or being a head chef, or get a business degree,” he said. “One other choice is going to a police academy. As long as I can run a mile within 15 minutes, I should be good.”
There’s no reason, now, to think he couldn’t accomplish that.
He got his first sack against Dexter.
‘I grabbed him and rolled him over on top of me,” Marcus said. “I would have liked to have landed on him, but I got him down in the backfield. It’s good.”
And football now is fun.
“A lot more fun,” he said.
“Marcus made a concerted effort to our strength and agility program,” Beaton said. “It wasn’t two days at a time, then not be there five or six days. Marcus was there. He would stay after everyone had left and get some extra lifts in or do some extra work to make sure he was putting himself in a (good) position.
“He said, ‘Coach, I want to be your starting nose (tackle).’ The first day of June camp, he ran out to the nose tackle, and we haven’t looked back.”
PHOTO: (Top) A pair of Pinckney blockers try to contain nose tackle Marcus Ford during a practice this season. (Middle) Ford breaks free to get an arm on a ball carrier. (Photos by Tim Robinson.)
Haslett Saving Big Hits for Game Time
August 16, 2016
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
HASLETT – The sound of cleats on pavement. He and his teammates, hand in hand, walking toward the field together minutes before kickoff. Manowar’s “Heart of Steel” ringing in their ears from a few minutes before.
Justin Kuchnicki gave himself goose bumps Monday describing Haslett’s weekly pregame ritual, which the senior lineman will take part in again beginning Aug. 26 when the Vikings open this season against Remus Chippewa Hills.
They’ll certainly be revved up – and especially to lay some big hits after saving them up during three weeks of non-collision practices.
Haslett has one of the most successful football programs in the Lansing area, with two trips to MHSAA championship games and 14 playoff appearances total over the last 18 seasons. The Vikings finished 6-4 a year ago against a schedule featuring four eventual playoff teams.
The program also might be the first in all of Michigan high school football to fully eliminate full-speed hitting at practice, something Haslett has moved toward over the last few seasons before longtime coach Charlie Otlewski decided to knock it out of his practice plans completely this fall in large part to keep his players healthier for when it matters most.
“It gives you the edge when it gets to game day. You practice all week and you’re not really hitting or doing anything like that, and you get to game day … and everyone’s ready to just go out there and fly around and make plays,” Kuchnicki said. “You’re not really worried about kinks and stuff in your body that you’d have from practices, so you just go out there and lay it on the line.”
Friday was the first day Michigan high school players were allowed to practice in full pads. Storms drenched mid-Michigan that afternoon, so Haslett’s first day in full gear was Monday. And from a distance, it sounded like any other full-contact practice with the normal hoots and hollers and smacking of pads.
But on closer look, it was anything but. Lineman worked against blocking dummies on a sled or teammates holding hand pads. When the offense came together to run plays, linemen blocked against overturned plastic trash barrels. On the opposite end of the field, subvarsity players worked on defensive pursuit angles but again without hitting. Under a set of uprights laid an old gymnastics mat used to soften the fall during tackling drills, which players again did against standup dummies instead of their teammates.
Reducing collisions – that is, live, game-speed, player-vs.-player hitting – remains the focus of most conversations on health and safety in football. Much of the discussion is centered on reducing concussions, and MHSAA rules changes that took effect beginning with the 2014 season limit teams to one practice per day during the preseason (when teams frequently practice twice) where collisions can take place. During the regular season, teams can have collisions during practice only two days per week.
Otlewski – who formerly coached St. Ignace from 1990-93 before taking over at Haslett in 1994 – said his practices used to follow what could be considered a traditional after-school plan: individual position drills for an hour or more followed by 11-on-11 full contact team practice for 30-40 minutes, twice a week.
But a handful of reasons, chiefly the desire to avoid injuries, started his program on a different path five years ago.
“Nobody wants injuries, but you surely don’t want them in practice. Then the concussion thing started to happen. (But) we didn’t do it because of concussions; we did it because of general overall injuries,” Otlewski said.
“If we lose a guy in Thursday’s scrimmage, or next Thursday in a game, OK, that’s football. But what we don’t want to do is lose someone in practice, because that seems unnecessary.”
The initial changes Haslett began to make to practices that fall of 2011 became drastic two years later, when he and his staff went to a different practice model completely. The Vikings now break every practice into 10-minute sessions alternating between team time and position drills, so position coaches can work with players individually before and after seeing how they perform when all 11 are running plays together.
This new breakdown brought the amount of player-on-player contact at practice down significantly as much more time was dedicated to learning proper footwork, blocking and tackling techniques and other fundamentals. Players on Monday worked at 50-percent speed, at most, against teammates either in front of them and also not moving at game speed, or against others holding pads and dummies.
The last two seasons, the only full-contact session during practices came during preparation for goalline situations; Otlewski and his staff decided to eliminate those this fall as well.
“We’re OK with a certain level (of contact). But we never want to go on the ground; we always want to stay up,” he said. “We want to go fast enough so where we have to use the perfect technique to get there footwork-wise. But we’re trying to eliminate the physicality part.”
To be clear, eliminating all collisions/contact is not required by the MHSAA. And there are probably more than a few in the coaching fraternity who would think Haslett is making a massive mistake.
But the Vikings’ no-contact strategy follows a way of thinking made popular in part by coaches like Dartmouth College’s Buddy Teevens, whose team hasn’t tackled during practices in six years. The Ivy League as a whole adopted a policy of no tackling in practice for the regular season beginning this fall.
Otlewski said teaching to tackle without contact allows his players to practice the same technique-building drills during four-player offseason workouts, his team’s no-pads summer camp and then while wearing pads during the season. His defense doesn’t face a live offense during the week, but he doesn’t think his players lose out because they can gain just as much from watching film and working on pursuit angles and recognizing formations. Same goes for his offense, which can still practice skill work and the passing game full-speed while lineman go half-speed working on footwork and blocking technique.
And he sees 37 players on his varsity roster, with that total remaining consistent over the last many seasons – while three opponents on this year’s schedule don’t have junior varsities and a fourth won’t field a freshman team.
His players three seasons ago didn’t really like the idea of not hitting in practice at first. But they’ve since bought in. He hasn’t heard a ton from parents either way; but he taught a class on football for local moms over the winter, and they seemed to like the idea as well.
“On one hand, I’m a little apprehensive,” Otlewski said. “OK, we haven’t gone full go. Is there a difference all of a sudden when it’s live Thursday against (Grand Rapids) Christian? Are we going to be up to speed?
“I think I still worry about that a little bit. But once we get into it, it’s fine.”
Kuchnicki is just as confident. Contact doesn’t bother this guy. He’s 6-foot-6 and in the neighborhood of 320 pounds. Sure, he’d love to have one contact practice this year so he and his teammates can back up some of the trash-talking they do to each other on the field.
But he’s fine with saving his biggest hits for opponents – and especially those who might think Haslett won’t be prepared for a physical game.
“They’d probably think we’re soft,” Kuchnicki said. “But when it comes game day, they change their minds instantly. I’ll tell you that.”
Geoff Kimmerly joined the MHSAA as its Media & Content Coordinator in Sept. 2011 after 12 years as Prep Sports Editor of the Lansing State Journal. He has served as Editor of Second Half since its creation in Jan. 2012. Contact him at [email protected] with story ideas for the Barry, Eaton, Ingham, Livingston, Ionia, Clinton, Shiawassee, Gratiot, Isabella, Clare and Montcalm counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Haslett lineman work on blocking during Monday's practice. (Middle) Vikings coach Charlie Otlewski instructs his players on one of the team's blocking schemes. (Below) Backs work on the option with barrels serving as the defensive front.