How COVID lockdowns shaped Vikings' young players
How COVID lockdowns shaped Vikings' young players
They saw the world shut down while they were trying to chase their dreams, now Vikings players who were in college during the pandemic recall their experiences
EAGAN — On March 13, 2020, the President of the United States declared COVID-19 a national emergency and the world went into lockdown. Athletes everywhere were left with uncertainty. When will this end? Are we going to play? What do I do now? For those with pro potential, the question was: How could this affect my career?
From the time the lockdown began through the two years (2020 and 2021) of battling COVID inside locker rooms, the Minnesota Vikings largely had a veteran leadership group. From a quarterback in his 30s to All-Pros like Eric Kendricks and Harrison Smith on defense to key offensive players in Dalvin Cook and Adam Thielen, the players who were guiding the ship had already been in the real world for some time when that major world event struck. But now as the roster is turning over, many of the players who are making up the foundation of the team were college students at the time of the lockdown, meaning that it impacted them in very different ways from those who were already in the pros.
The pandemic hit them when they were developing as players and people, forcing them to find ways to deal with isolation at a time where they would most want to be social. It pushed them away from the structure of classes and familiarity of locker rooms and workout facilities and dealt them a sudden change in their routine-heavy lives.
“Zoom and FaceTime only helped so much and [young athletes] didn’t have the individual connections that they crave at that age,” said founder of Premier Sport Psychology Dr. Justin Anderson. “Some players on the bubble felt like they had to grind much harder because they felt they didn’t get the opportunities they would have gotten had it been a full season and Senior Bowls and All-Star games and the Combine. Those guys were feeling shortchanged and it was difficult mentally.”
Dr. Anderson said that one of the ways athletes best dealt with the challenges of lockdowns was by setting goals for themselves — by finding ways to make themselves better amidst a time where it felt like the whole outside world was burning to the ground. Those who could find worthwhileness within the struggle were able to make the most of a bad situation.
“The athletes that found a purpose within that adversity did seem to find stability and it gave them something to strive toward when everything seemed to stop,” Dr. Anderson said. “If you have that anchor of your identity, that growth is peace, then when there’s setbacks…what can I learn from that? What is this telling me? What am I missing?”
Vikings budding star left tackle Christian Darrisaw, who was entering his junior year in 2020, got some advice from his offensive line coach Vance Vice that he took to heart. Vice told him, “Make sure you stay on top of it because this is eventually going to end.”
For Darrisaw, staying on top of it meant taking the extra time to study game tape. Until the lockdown the only time he had broken down his game on film was when he was in offensive line meetings. He was still a good player at Virginia Tech because he was more physically gifted than 99% of college football but once he began to watch his games closely his eyes were opened to a whole new world of the game.
“I just knew that to be the player I knew I could be, I have to take this to the next level. What will help me? Diving deeper and to really be a student of the game,” Darrisaw said at TCO Performance Center on Wednesday.
During the lockdown, Darrisaw and three other linemen stayed in a lake house. It became like a lineman’s retreat. They would get on Zoom meetings, do their online classes, get out on the water and then watch film. They would ask each other questions. How did you block that guy? What did you see there? How can I get better at that?
“Those guys who were around during that time helped me stay up mentally,” Darrisaw said.
Darrisaw started to notice some of his own tendencies, discovering that he was tipping the play sometimes with his stance. He figured out that there were certain times where he could mix it up so he wasn’t giving away run or pass to the defenders who were studying him on tape.
What he enjoyed most was learning about defenses.
“How can I take the next step? To know what the defender is going to do,” Darrisaw said. “Anything from like, right foot up or left foot up, what types of moves he does….Whether it’s reading the D-linemen and linebackers’ position or the safeties, some dudes are going to have tells whether the cornerback is going to [blitz] or the linebacker is going to blitz in the gap or the defensive end is going to slant, stuff like that. Breaking it down to that point where I could be one step ahead of my opponent.”
When he arrived in Minnesota and the complexity of those defenses increased, Darrisaw already had habits in place for studying film that he could build upon. He wouldn’t have had that if not for his mindset during the lockdown.
“It was a blessing in disguise even when everything around was negative we turned it into positives and it worked out,” he said.
Starting safety Cam Bynum remembers the date of the lockdown without being reminded. That was the day he suffered a pretty serious injury. He just finished up spring practices and noticed some swelling in his knee. A day later Bynum was having surgery to repair his meniscus.
You would think that nothing would be more frustrating than the world being locked down and being banged up but it was the opposite for Bynum. His recovery gave him something to reach for rather than just watching the days pass by.
“Being able to have that time and purpose to have a goal — like, I want to be able to jog in two weeks, I want to be able to run full speed within a month, I was able to find the purpose behind the whole thing,” Bynum said.
Doing his recovery without feeling like he was missing something was much easier on him mentally. He didn’t have to watch his team do workouts while he was rehabbing or feel like he was separated from the group by his injury.
Bynum tried to find the fun in staying in shape while being back home rather than in his university’s gym. His old setup inside the garage was still in tact so he got creative.
“It was a weird time but I loved the old school workouts and have a weight room in my home that I used growing up and going back to the roots of working out at the high school,” Bynum said. “It was super fun for me.”
He also learned how to play piano. Bynum connected with a teacher over Zoom and starting picking up the instrument note by note. Once he got the basics, his teacher gave him lessons on classical, R&B and jazz tunes. He’s still playing to this day.
“I’m still not super good but I’m able to play and learn a few songs, it’s been a good journey to start it then and carry it on until now,” Bynum said.
Vikings rookie Jaren Hall was already out with a medical redshirt when the lockdown happened. But he was aware that starter Zach Wilson was likely going to the NFL so he wanted to be ready. He went back and studied the few games he played in 2019 and dove into his practice tape looking for answers.
“Really just taking a lot of time away, a lot of self reflection about football,” Hall said. “It gave me a chance to reflect and do some checks and balances and see what I needed to work on going into the next season and it helped lift off my career.”
For Hall, that time wasn’t just about getting better at football, it was leaning on family for support. He got married the previous December and his and his wife’s parents both lived close by.
“We had a really great support group,” Hall said. “It was never something we had to do alone.”
Jalen Nailor had a different type of support group: Call of Duty.
The Vikings’ second-year receiver said that his teammates would join together online and play the video game, which allowed them to continue to bond despite the fact everything else about their football experience had changed.
“It was a different vibe,” Nailor said. “Not being able to be at our own place and practice the way we normally practice. Everything was separated with different lift groups and things like that, it was pretty rough.”
He added that once the team did get back together, there was an additional closeness because of everything that they had gone through. And he had a lot more SpongeBob references from binging one of his favorite shows as a kid and he fell in love with the show How to Get Away with Murder.
“We would advise finding community in any way and if video games were a way to do that where you could play and have fun and get lost [in the game] and still have community that’s a great solution,” Dr. Anderson said.
While the group of Vikings players who dealt with the pandemic in different ways remembered it with more nostalgia than angst, Dr. Anderson noted that a lot of athletes dealt with burnout. They were asked to take on a marathon to get through COVID and then sprint full speed getting back into chasing their goals on the field.
There was also something lost that may take time to be regained: The connections with others. Recently Rams QB Matthew Stafford’s wife Kelly said on a podcast that he had trouble connecting with younger players because they were always on their phones. The world was already moving toward texting and tweeting and away from talking to begin with but the pandemic exacerbated that effect.
“The emotional intelligence that gets developed in early adult years, some of that may have gotten robbed,” Dr. Anderson said. “We may be stunted a little bit from an emotional intelligence and social intelligence aspect…. I think we have some making up to do and a lot of work still needs to be done.”
One good thing that came from that difficult time, Dr. Anderson said, was that athletes and teams started to take mental health more seriously, which can have a long-term positive impact on players as it becomes destigmatized.
“The use of mental health services and sport psychology has increased significantly since the pandemic,” Dr. Anderson said. “I think it was one of the first times that coaches realized that their players’ mental health wasn’t going so well…they were saying, ‘What do we do?’ They saw their athletes suffering and felt responsibility but didn’t have a lot of control or opportunity to do anything to help so they started to lean into sport psychology and reach out to us. We were getting more front and center in a lot of places because of it.”
In a way, going through something of that magnitude bonds these young players who will take the Vikings into the future. They speak some of the same language because they all shared a similar experience. They made it to the other side by coping in their own ways, which prepared them for the challenges of playing in the NFL.
“I’ve had a lot more experiences in life and how to handle adversity,” Hall said. “That’s what I’ve learned the NFL is early on, it’s a lot of adversity, it’s a lot of growth and growing pains and things to overcome.”