Some Light Reading While I'm Gone

Miss me yet?

If it makes you feel any better, I'm missing Georgia. Seriously, how do people live in the North when it snows this much? Or more to the point, how did I do it for so long?

Anyway, I wrote a piece on Kwame Geathers a while back for Dean Legge's Dawg Post Magazine. It's now up on his site for Dawg Post subscribers, if you're interested in checking it out.

I spent a while talking to Clay Walker, one of Georgia's S&C coaches, about what it took to get Geathers ready for SEC football -- and it was a challenge to be sure.

Here's a tidbit from the piece:

Geathers’ early days at Georgia were the rudest of awakenings.

His older brother Robert played for the Bulldogs and is now in the NFL, and his other brother Clifton has played for South Carolinafor the past three seasons, but even that family legacy wasn’t enough to prepare Kwame Geathers for what was in store.

“I had to learn plays, learn to practice and do things the Georgia way,” Geathers said. “I had to do all that and get into condition all at the same time.”

And when it came to conditioning, Geathers was just short of a lost cause.

He arrived on campus three days after fall camp began, delayed from earning clearance from the NCAA and, in turn, delayed in preparing his body for the rigors of life in the SEC.

The early results were dismal. Geathers was badly overweight, weighing in at 355 pounds, Walker said. Practices weren’t just tough – they were impossible. Geathers simply couldn’t do what the coaches asked of him.

“When he first got here, the kid was completely out of shape,” Walker said. “He had a bad body, he literally couldn’t run a half-gasser without giving out. That’s just something standard. I don’t know what he did all summer, but it certainly wasn’t getting ready for football.”

Anyway, you can find the rest HERE.

For all the knocks the strength and conditioning staff has taken in recent months, Kwame appears to be one of its real success stories.