It’s Day 1 of a four-day, NCAA Pro Day swing across five states in the Northeast, and I wake up in a New Jersey hotel to the buzzing of my 6:15 a.m. alarm.
It’s time to go through my morning routine — get dressed, answer a few e-mails, check out of the hotel and get to Princeton University by 7:30 a.m.
After a 20-minute drive, I arrive at a parking garage on campus and hustle over to the Princeton practice facility to check in.
Participating Princeton players then have their hand, arm length, and wingspan measured before lining up to have their height and weight tallied as well. A designated scout announces each result as they are measured, while others swiftly jot down the numbers.
Once the weigh-in portion is complete, it’s time for the testing portion of the Pro Day. Players start by bench pressing 225 pounds as many times in a row as possible, with all eyes on them. Teammates, coaches, and agents in family members in attendance cheer them on loudly, getting more and more excited with every rep. While the bench test is obviously a test of strength, it’s also a measure of a player’s commitment to the weight room and their overall work ethic.
The bench is then followed by the vertical jump and broad jump, which measure a player’s lower half explosiveness.
Once those three tests are complete, the stop watches come out as the 40-yard dash, 3-Cone drill, and 20-yard shuttle finish off the testing portion.
On this morning, the testing portion concludes at 10 and is followed by positional drills. These positional drills give scouts in attendance an understanding of how the players move in more football-specific situations.
After a jam-packed three hours, the Princeton Pro Day is concluded, but the day is far from over.
Next stop is 35 minutes away in New Brunswick, New Jersey for the Rutgers Pro Day.
With Blue Bombers studs such as Janarion Grant and Carlton Agudosi hailing from Rutgers, attending their Pro Day is a must. And while the Princeton Pro Day went from 7:30 to 11 a.m., Rutgers lasted from noon until 5:45 p.m., with more athletes and scouts in attendance. Knowing that several scouts have rushed straight from Princeton to New Brunswick, Rutgers kindly provided lunch to the scouts in attendance to help keep our stomachs full and minds sharp.
Once the Pro Day has wrapped up, it’s not yet time to go home. Instead, it’s time for a three-hour drive north to Storrs, Connecticut, where tomorrow morning’s University of Connecticut Pro Day will occur. Unfortunately for me, I happened to leave Rutgers right in the middle of rush hour, hitting all sorts of traffic on my way up.
While on my way to Storrs, since I had already run into some traffic, I made the decision to take a small detour to famous New Haven-style pizza spot, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana. If you’ve never had New Haven-style pizza, it’s worth taking the detour. Plus, having a slice of pepperoni makes dealing with traffic more tolerable.
After several hours in the car, I finally reach my destination around 9:30 p.m., but instead of resting, now it’s time to input my notes from the day into our formatted spreadsheet and watch film of the players who stuck out during the day. This ends up taking another three hours, with the clock passing midnight as I continue to type up notes.
At about 12:30 a.m., I head to bed and fall asleep almost immediately. It’ll be another long day tomorrow with another 6:15 wake up time, and two more Pro Days up next tomorrow.
While this all may sound like a draining process, if you love to scout like Danny McManus, Ted Goveia and I do, the prospect of potentially finding the next stud Blue Bomber has you jumping out of bed with a smile on your face each morning.
Cyril Penn is a Blue Bombers U.S.-based scout and he will be writing regularly for bluebombers.com through the spring, providing an inside look at some of the American prospects the club will be bringing to camp.
