MORGANTOWN — You hear it all the time, this talk about how important experience is whether it is on the professional level or in college.
It is a point that is so obvious that often it just rolls through the conversation without anyone realizing exactly what it means, for experience comes in many forms, especially when you are a true freshman moving forward.
Every day is a new adventure really for a freshman football player at West Virginia like Robert Sands, who established himself as a future star at safety last year.
Each game you see a new blocking scheme or technique, a new move from a receiver. You practice moves but don’t yet have them down pat in a game and sometimes you make a reaction and discover something about yourself that you didn’t know.
Last football season, Sands was a presence on the field, but failed to make the big play, the kind that they know will come from him next season. He sacked no one. He tackled no one for a loss. He didn’t break up a pass or intercept one.
At 6-5 and as athletic as he is, you know all of that is in him and you wonder why he couldn’t pull it off last season as a freshman.
The reason the big plays didn’t come, he believes, is because there was that uncertainty in his mind on every play, that instantaneous delay to figure out what it was that was playing out before him that slowed him down that half step.
Until you reach the point that you react rather than think, and the ability to do that comes only from experience, you are at a disadvantage, especially on defense where you are always reacting.
Coaches, of course, try to inject experience into the inexperienced by repetition and by asking them to spend time in the film room, perhaps allowing them to recognize certain aspects of a team’s offense without actually having to experience it.
And so it is that Sands has taken to watching a lot of film on his own.
“I want to see the mistakes I made as a freshman so I don’t make the same ones I made as a sophomore,” the rangy Floridian said.
Anyone who has ever had his golf swing filmed knows how important film study is. The mind’s eye often is far different than reality and the best way to recognize it is to see it on film.
So Sands is studying himself to improve and the coaches obviously believe that is important.
He is also looking at opponents’ film, seeing their offense in such a way that by next season he will feel as if he has seen their plays over and over. It is not game experience, but it is the next best thing.
“Film helps you better yourself and helps you go to the next level,” he said. “Anybody can say they had a good year, but you want to have a great year and you want to be consistent with that. You don’t want to have one good game. You want to have multiple good games. You want to have a great season, not one or two good games.”
So it was the other day that Sands was walking through the Puskar Center after working out to go study film when he passed offensive coordinator Jeff Mullen in the hall.
“Where you going?” Mullen asked.
“To watch film,” Sands replied.
“Well, if you ever need help knowing what the quarterback is doing or looking for, come and talk to me,” Mullen said.
Bells went off in Sands’ head.
This would be a breakthrough, a chance to figure out what the offense is trying to do, what the quarterback wants to do on this play or that play.
He’s taken advantage of Mullen’s offer and drops by his office when Mullen is free to pick his brain, to pick up maybe one or two nuggets that might take two or three years of experience to figure out on his own … if he did it at all.
That makes so much sense that it might serve all the offensive coaches to make time to talk with their defensive players and vice versa, to give them the theories of what the week’s opponent is trying to do in hopes adding to their understanding.
Contact Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com or through Facebook.
Bob Herzel
HERTZEL COLUMN - Sands working hard at WVU
- Bob Herzel
-
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: Patrone finally gets his due
Lee Patrone says he remembers it vividly, even though more than 50 years have passed, and while it was the greatest accomplishment in his life it has nothing to do with the West Virginia University basketball career that has lifted him into the Class of 2012 that will be inducted into the Mountaineer Sports Hall of Fame in September.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: No doubt WVU made out well
There was a cold, ill wind blowing in from the north on Friday.
It was the kind of wind that blows whenever a Pitt man opens his mouth, as the Pittsburgh athletic director Steve Pederson did. -
Tears and memories: VIDEO
It was mid-Thursday afternoon at the Morgantown Event Center and the crowd stood mostly silently in line that wound out of the Events Hall and into the hallway toward the staircase.
A young lady was there holding a singular golden rose
“I wish,” Rebecca Durst said, “it could be gold and blue.” -
HERTZEL COLUMN: Stew fondly remembered by players
The tributes have poured in all week for Bill Stewart, the former West Virginia University football coach whose sudden and unexpected death from a heart attack at age 59 on Monday stunned the state, but it wasn’t the administrators or executives or politicians who really knew him.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: White right there with Hall of Famers
Back on New Year’s Eve, 2008, shortly after West Virginia University had edged North Carolina, 31-30, to win the Meineke Car Care Bowl, an attempt was made to put Mountaineer quarterback Patrick White into his proper historical perspective.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: Pat Beilein follows in father’s path
In a day filled with the sorrow of former West Virginia University football coach Bill Stewart’s sudden and unexpected death, there was a ray of sunshine that managed to slip through, a happening that shows us all that even in death there is life and as one son grieves, as does Stewart’s son, Blaine, somewhere else a father basks in pride over his son.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN - Stewart’s gift was giving
It was the kind of cosmic happening that defies description. We all come across them from time to time, leaving us in a state of disbelief.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: This ‘Maniac’ makes music with Kilicli
Mike Martin wasn’t long removed from his New York roots, a somewhat rare import in these parts compared to the migration of New Jerseyites who matriculate at West Virginia University.
-
Van Zant fired as WVU baseball coach
West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck believes with a new coach and a new stadium the Mountaineers can compete with the likes of Texas and Oklahoma for the Big 12 baseball championship but understands it will not come easily or quickly.
-
SEC, Big 12 team up for bowl
Even before the full impact of West Virginia University’s 2014 season-opening meeting with Alabama in Atlanta has been grasped, the opportunity presented itself for the two to meet again later in that season or future ones in a bowl agreement between the Big 12 and SEC that is much like the Rose Bowl agreement between the Big Ten and the Pac-12.
- More Bob Herzel Headlines
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: Patrone finally gets his due
