“They lower the weight a little bit, but not much,” Smith said. He pulls down 45 pounds 50 times in 30 seconds. Smith lies on his back with his feet up on an electronic pulley machine. On a late January afternoon, the hottest place in the United States might be the workout area adjacent to one of the training fields. The charge is $16,000 and is usually paid by the player’s agent, who sees it as a cheap investment for a client whom he hopes will sign a contract worth millions. They’ve now expanded to five locations with 120 full-time employees, not counting area coaches who conduct drills.
In 2001, the site became a specialized pre-combine training center. Georgia Tech’s former strength coach wanted a training refuge for elite athletes and opened the first one in an old Staples building in Tempe, Ariz., in 1999. The whole concept of pre-draft training centers started with founder Mark Verstegen. There’s even a 3,400-seat velodrome, for crying out loud. There are 10 grass training fields, 32 tennis courts, a track stadium and baseball and softball fields. Tennis Association and USA Track & Field. Squeezed in the suburban sprawl between the south end of Los Angeles and the Pacific, API is a 7,400-square-foot sports training megalopolis.ĭrive under the welcoming arch and you see a 27,000-seat soccer stadium, home to the Los Angeles Galaxy, Chivas USA and the U.S. One look at API and any player with a glimmer of the NFL in his dreams would shelve the books. “If you have an opportunity to make $10 million and come out of one semester, I think that’s a payoff,” said Woodfin, who left UAB early for API but went back to school and earned his degree. In an era when colleges are under pressure to improve graduation rates, API lures players away from degrees for short-term prospects. Still, many players punt their final semester of their senior year for API and thereby forego graduation. Utah’s Koa Misi went from a projected middle- to late-round pick to Miami in the second round. Last year, for instance, linebacker David Veikune, a projected late-round pick out of Hawaii, went to Cleveland in the second round. We make sure these guys have seen everything before they go into the combine,” he said.ĪPI is quick to trumpet its success stories. “We make sure that no one thing is overlooked.
He’s sitting on small bleachers watching Smith join defensive backs and receivers go through fundamental drills. His football card isn’t much, but his stories are.Īs for API, “It is very intensive,” he said. He did get into a game with the Baltimore Ravens, and was on the Houston Texans’ practice squad for awhile, and played for the Frankfurt Galaxy. He never made it on the field for a regular- season game with the Packers.
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Green Bay scouts saw him at UAB’s pro day and signed him as an undrafted free agent. His stint there helped him go from 225 to 245 pounds and drop his 40-yard dash time from 4.8 to 4.6. He was an undersized linebacker on Alabama-Birmingham’s only bowl team, in 2004, and begged his agent to place him at API. He said he hasn’t told his clients his story, but he should. Lean with bulging biceps, he doesn’t have the hulking muscle- head build of some weight-room junkies, but he’s got a body that commands every draft pick’s attention. Woodfin, 27, has the build of a fitness pro as committed to his clients’ health as he is to his own. If I run a 4.5, I’m just another big guy.” “A 4.4 to a 4.3 is literally tens of millions of dollars. “A 4.5 to a 4.4 means a million dollars,” Smith said. They can have another try at a pro day on their campus, but nail it in Indianapolis and they’re set. How seriously? Take the combine’s 40-yard dash. Smith, a two-time all-Big 12 cornerback at the University of Colorado, is in the middle of an eight-week tour of duty he hopes will make him a first-round draft pick. Woodfin is a performance specialist at Athletes’ Performance Inc., one of those intense, high- tech, pre-draft training centers that have become de rigueur for NFL prospects. It’s not stopping Zac Woodfin, one of the keys to Smith’s NFL future, from barking orders like a traffic cop. Forty-five pounds of lead probably could stop a grenade. He’s in a pull-up position, with gravity torturing him, wearing what looks like a grenade-proof vest. His mouth is carved into a grimace you’d associate with someone undergoing an appendectomy without anesthesia. His chin is perched precariously over a bar as his biceps and forearms shake like branches in a storm. Jimmy Smith is hanging on for dear life.
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Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close MenuĮditor’s note: Second in a series detailing how former CU cornerback Jimmy Smith is preparing for the NFL draft in April.ĬARSON, Calif.
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