City rallies around youth and football
Ninety kids, the NFL people told him. You get 90 kids out and that’s a heck of an inaugural football camp, that’s some fine work indeed.
And Jason Baker held his tongue.
Jason Baker just smiled and nodded and agreed.
Jason Baker smiled and nodded and agreed. But behind the smile, inside his head, a thought was forming, and maybe it went something like this: These people have no clue about this town.
Ninety kids for a football camp? In Fort Wayne, Indiana?
Piece of cake.
“In my head I was thinking, ‘I’m pretty sure I can make two phone calls and get that,’ ” Baker says as the second year of his camp is about to begin this week.
Sure. He’d call Russ Isaacs over at Snider. He’d call Casey Kolkman over at North Side. He’d call any number of coaches to rally around, because this was Fort Wayne, and it was football, and even if you’re a guy like Baker, who’s eight years deep in a solid career as an NFL punter, you don’t forget that this is as much as anything a football town, because this was after all the place that first set your feet to that path.
For Baker that was Wayne High School, which led to the University of Iowa, which led to first San Francisco, and then Kansas City, and then briefly Indianapolis and Denver, and now Carolina these past four seasons. And he’s not alone, of course.
There was Rod Woodson from Snider, of course, a sure Hall of Famer. Jason Fabini from Bishop Dwenger is in the league. Anthony Spencer from Bishop Luers is. Trai Essex from Harding is, and Bernard Pollard from South Side is, and, this weekend, James Hardy from Elmhurst will be, as a projected first-round pick in the NFL draft.
That’s some decent representation for a city of 250,000 or so in Indiana. That’s résumé enough to stamp this as, yes, a football town.
And so when Baker got involved initially last year because of Wayne Principal Adam Swinford’s desire to get an NFL program called Play It Smart into his school, the thing exceeded expectations from the jump. The 90 kids quickly became 350, crammed into one site at Wayne.
“It was great, but it was a little overwhelming,” Baker says.
And so this year, the camp has expanded to two sites, Wayne and Concordia. One hundred twenty-five kids ages 11 to 14 will be at each site. They’ll get eight full practices beginning at 6 p.m. each day from Monday through Thursday the next two weeks, and the whole thing will culminate in a jamboree-style scrimmage involving everyone May 3 at Zollner Stadium.
“The template of the camp is that it’s required you never have more than an 8-to-1 ratio for coaches to kids,” Baker says. “And really, it’s all about the coaches, how much energy they want to put into it. There’s a pretty good group of high school and middle school coaches who really believe in it.”
As does Baker.
He says the goal is to provide “a developmental and teaching environment” that enables coaches and players to work extensively on fundamentals. The fruits, he says, will be harvested in the fall and, hopefully, beyond.
“There’s so many things I learned from the environment football creates,” he says. “Even if you never play a down after high school, there’s so many things you learn. Part of this camp is that we try to weave in life skills every night, so that the kids learn responsibility and accountability and all those things you do learn in a football environment.
“It’s a very unique experience. We’re hoping this kind of program, using coaches in town to do the coaching rather than just whoever, will create a really special dynamic.”
A special dynamic? In this town?
Piece of cake.
Maybe this is what you need here, a man who takes the game ball from his athletic director and considers the remembrance case handled.