Adrian makes for happy campers
I spent Thursday at the Adrian Peterson Football Camp and came away with a slightly higher appreciation for football camps. Because of Peterson.
Football camps are largely silly. Football camps are like football practice, in that no way they can be fun. When you go to baseball practice, you basically play baseball. Hit, field, throw. When you go to basketball practice, you mostly play basketball. But when you go to football practice, you don’t do much football playing.
Peterson’s camp contained a lot of stations with kids going through drills that will help for footwork and technique and cause a 9-year-old to scream out in boredom. Later in the morning, the camp broke up into 7-on-7 games, which was a lot more entertaining for the campers.
Thus the dilemma of a football camp. To learn football, you can’t have any fun. To have fun, you won’t learn anything.
So what’s the value? Peterson, I’d say. Adrian went all over the camp, working with the kids, clowning around, saying hello. He took a break to do a media bit, but otherwise, he was with the kids.
Which had to be pleasing to the campers. The truth was these kids, who seemed to range in age from seven or eight to maybe 12, didn’t come to OU’s intramural fields to learn football. They came to get as close to Adrian Peterson as possible.
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When my son was going to high school, and Bobby Knight was at Indiana, his school went twice to Knights camp. I went to observe one of them. Unless you were a highly touted kid, the camp was a big waste of time and money. Knight appeared once, I think, to give a speech. The rest of the time the kids spent playing against one another. OK it was against teams which they would not see the rest of the year, but still just a big waste of time. You could not even buy a bottle of pop unless Knight sold it from his machines.
Most camps are just money making for the coach..who really needs it, oh, yeah!!!