Players knelt opposite of each other, creating a middle gap of space that the wide receivers coach Jacoby Jones, a Lane College alum who scored touchdowns in the Super Bowl as a Baltimore Raven, walked through as he shouted at his team, pumping them up for what would be another brutally hot and hard practice. Jones was clearly the alpha and looked like he could still play.
Football is one of the most physical and challenging sports there is. I talked to Ted Kluck, Union University journalism professor and long-snapping coach for Lane College’s football team, about the game, Lane and why he coaches there.
“I came out here because I went to a Lane game my first year at Union,” Kluck said. “I went just as a fan, actually with a friend from the Lane faculty, and fell in love with it. This is, for me, a vacation, sometimes the highlight of my week.”
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Kluck’s football background is extensive, as he played in high school, at a small college, in France and for a variety of semi-pro and arena football teams. Football is a sport that Union does not participate in, though the idea of it returning has been rumored off and on for a while now.
“You always know where you stand in football. It’s very modern in that way, in that there are boundaries,” Kluck said. “There are literally boundaries, [such as] a scoreboard. It’s hard to leave a football field feeling ambiguous about where you stand.”
This was soon proved true. Without staying for long, I could already spot the alpha players.
“I think in 2019 in academia, almost everything is ambiguous, including what you can and can’t say from day to day,” Kluck said. “This is just a break from that. It’s a break from kind of second guessing and the kind of eggshell walking you have to do in the academy. You can kind of just let all of that go out here and be a little bit savage and enjoy it.”
For schools like Lane, football has a historical impact on the team and the school. Kluck said that since the SEC did not fully integrate until the 1970s, many NFL elites from that period played at HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). For instance, Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees Walter Payton and Jackie Slater played for Jackson State.
“The result of that segregated SEC situation is that a lot of talented black athletes would come to schools like this and stay in schools like this, and you know, it’s a unique environment even to this day,” Kluck said. “Some of the schools we play, like Morehouse College and Tuskegee University, they’ve got really interesting and rich histories, and we have that at Lane too. It’s a huge privilege to be involved in it.”
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Lane has not only rich history, but also an extremely talented coaching staff. Lane’s head coach, Derrick Burroughs, played in the NFL for the Buffalo Bills, where he was a first round draft choice out of the University of Memphis. After a long NFL career, former Baltimore Raven Jacoby Jones decided to return to the school he played for and help the program grow.
But football isn’t just about history or a talented staff. The sport is brutal, unforgiving, and a tremendous challenge for any college athlete to play while in school.
“Football is a grind. It’s violent, it’s hard, it’s hard on the body and the mind. I just try to be a breath of fresh air to these guys,” Kluck said. “These guys work really, really hard. This is like having a full-time job. They’re up at 5 a.m. to lift weights. They’re watching film and going to meetings at night and they’re doing this starting at 3 o’clock. Our athletes at Union work just as hard. I just want to be kind to them and bring a little humanity into something that can be dehumanizing.”
Kluck’s remarks couldn’t be more accurate. As I stayed for the full three-hour practice, I was impressed by the level of effort that all of the players displayed. They ran hard, hit hard, lifted hard and did the drills without complaint, all while fully padded with the sun directly beating down on them.
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The whole practice seemed almost militaristic. The coach gave the orders, the players executed them, and Lane’s band practiced in the background. The sound of drums reverberating perfectly from practice building to field gave the whole scene a constant feel of tension.
Though there is a certain type of camaraderie amongst the players—these men are brothers, really—there’s still an understanding that if you show out at practice, you’ll have a better chance to start in a game. And so I’d squint in the overbearing daylight to see receivers run routes as fast as possible and make every effort possible to score a touchdown against the defender. When a defender would stop the receiver and get a decent hit in, you could hear the trash talk, see the helmets bump against each other and then watch as they’d split, ready to re-run the same play again.
And these players do enjoy it. While many are on scholarship, most play the game because they simply love it, even if a scholarship is why they’re there. With the pressure of academia, football, though challenging, is a way for them to wind down, do something they love and also express who they are. Constantly, I saw players dancing around after a good play, shouting, encouraging other players (or talking trash) and keeping a certain type of enthusiasm in a practice that seemed unbearable because of the heat.
Though the game is brutal, there is something so amazing about watching the commitment and effort that a team of players shows, even if it is just a practice. For them, playing is an experience that they will cherish for the rest of their lives, one that is continually made possible by a coaching staff that invests all that they can.
Photos courtesy of Neil Cole