School Daze (Adjusting to College Academics/Football)

[Cheesesteak]

School Daze
An Early Graduate of Dunbar, Benn Adjusts to Hectic College Schedule

By Eli Saslow - Washington Post Staff Writer - January 26, 2007

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Arrelious Benn stood at the center of the University of Illinois campus and spun in a circle, scanning for Davenport Hall. He had trudged from one brick building to the next for almost 20 minutes now, snow blowing in his face. Teammates had told him Davenport Hall sat on the Quad, whatever that meant. Benn checked the time. His first college class started in five minutes.

The night before, Benn had sifted through an unpacked box of clothes and selected his outfit: jeans, a black Helly Hansen coat and the waffled long johns he'd bought to guard against the Midwestern cold. He woke up early that morning and studied a large campus map, planning his route to the Quad. About 35 minutes before his Composition 101 class began, he left the Illinois football complex. He hated being late.

Benn stopped a passerby on the Quad and asked where he could find Davenport Hall. He believed he followed the man's directions -- and ended up at the edge of a parking lot. Benn walked back toward the main campus, faster now, tugging at the straps of his red backpack, and stopped another student.

"You ever heard of Davenport Hall?" he asked.

"Yeah," the student said. "You're standing right in front of it."

When Benn, 18, decided to graduate a semester early from Dunbar High School and enroll at Illinois on a football scholarship in January, he essentially traded the most comfortable four months of his life for a long stretch of uncertainty and anxiety. He left behind a steady girlfriend, his mother and three younger brothers in Washington.

When he and his mother debated the decision to graduate early, Benn used the same logic that led more than 50 freshman football players to enroll this month at colleges across the country: A few extra months on campus would give Benn, a wide receiver, a better chance to contribute immediately on the football team, he said. He could make the transition to college without the chaos of football season in the fall.

But during his first few days in Champaign, Benn hardly could imagine a more overwhelming transition. On Jan. 16, his first day of class, his schedule demanded 90 minutes of weightlifting, an hour of informal football practice, three academic classes, an appointment with an academic adviser, a mandatory team dinner, a team meeting, two hours of study hall and an introduction to the team playbook. The beginning of his Division I football career meant the end of just about everything else.

In the weeks before he left for college, Benn had imagined decking out his new dorm room like a king's suite, but he abandoned that vision when he walked into Room 375 for the first time. The wooden door opened to a small room with a brown tiled floor and whitewashed concrete walls. A three-foot walkway separated Benn's bed from his roommate's side of the room, which would have worked fine if not for the smell.

Eddie McGee, a freshman quarterback from H.D. Woodson, lived on the other side of Room 375. In his rush to leave for winter break, he shoved his sweaty workout clothes, dirty Gatorade cups and half-eaten granola bars into a pile under his desk. On his first night in Champaign, Benn bought a can of Febreze air freshener and doused all of McGee's stuff.

When Benn complained to teammates about McGee's pile, they told him that his dorm room hardly mattered anyway. He'd hardly ever see it.

Vontae Davis, a freshman defensive back and Benn's former teammate at Dunbar, sat down with Benn on his first night in town and outlined a typical day. Davis said he often stayed up until 11:30 p.m. for study hall and woke up at 5:30 a.m. for weightlifting. In between, he sometimes slept on the leather couches in the players' lounge of the football complex with several other freshmen. To walk five minutes back to the dorms, Davis explained, would be a waste of time.

"You basically don't have a free minute," Davis told Benn. "You've got to be on top of everything, or else nothing gets done."

Even though he was at least a year younger than most of his teammates, Benn felt confident he could manage that schedule. Since high school, he had pursued his football career with dedication. He ate no red meat. He met regularly with a personal trainer. He made few close friends. When police arrested his older brother, Trulon Henry, in 2003 for robbing a grocery store, Benn only tightened his focus. He vowed to restore his family's reputation by making better decisions, even as he drove 300 miles to a correctional facility in Glenville, W.Va., twice each month to visit his brother.

Benn decided early in his junior year that he wanted to leave for college in January, so he took an extra English class and enrolled in summer school. Before he left for Illinois, his mother, Denise, asked Benn if he wanted to come home for prom and graduation. "Nah, I don't care about that," Benn said. "I'll probably be busy."

Ron Zook, the Illinois football coach, told Benn he'd made a good decision by arriving in January. Zook led an inexperienced team to a 2-10 record in 2006, and some of his freshmen had struggled to adjust to the college football schedule. A freshman quarterback missed a crucial team meeting because he had promised a teacher he would visit her during office hours. Another first-year player, having never flown before, asked if he could forgo the team flight and instead take a train to a road game in New Jersey.

Benn "isn't going to have those freshman hiccups," Zook said. "By the time the season starts, he'll basically be like a redshirt freshman. And when you think about it, what's a kid doing spring semester in high school? As a coach, you're worried about them getting in trouble, jacking around, things like that. Instead, he's going to get bigger, stronger, a whole lot smarter. College is going to seem routine."

By the time Benn slid into a soft blue chair at his 11 a.m. sociology lecture, he felt ready for a nap. Already, during his first day as a college student, he'd lifted weights, gulped down a protein shake, met with an assistant coach, attended his writing class, eaten a protein bar and rushed across the campus to make it to sociology. "It feels like nighttime," Benn said as he walked into the classroom.

Benn grabbed a class syllabus and walked down to the third row. His teacher, Noreen Sugrue, introduced herself to the class. She talked about the structure of the course, sounding reasonable enough, and Benn twisted his Pittsburgh Pirates hat backward and slumped against the back of his blue chair. Finally, he could relax.

"Flip to the homework assignments at the back of your syllabus, please," Sugrue said. "You'll see here that you need to have a novel read" in two days' time.

Two hours later, Benn met with his academic adviser and dropped the sociology class, reducing his load to 13 credits. "I'm starting to get the feeling that's going to be enough," he told his adviser. "My brain is on overload."

Benn wanted to save much of his mental energy for learning Illinois's complicated offense, the basics of which he'd devoured since he announced his commitment to play for the Fighting Illini during a live ESPNU broadcast on Nov. 9. Two Illinois coaches had traveled to Benn's house in Northeast Washington shortly thereafter to give him an abridged version of the team's playbook. Benn read through the packet each night, memorizing personnel groups and formations. After he arrived at his dorm in Champaign, he focused on learning the team's hand signals. He sometimes stood in front of his mirror and mimicked the gestures, convinced that the repetition would make an imprint on his brain.

Benn never had felt insecure about anything related to football, and it drove him crazy that his new teammates understood the Illinois offense better than he did. Benn had outlined goals for a record-breaking freshman season: to start at wide receiver; to make a handful of game-changing plays; to lead the Big Ten in receiving.

At 6 feet 2 and 210 pounds, Benn had the bulging calves and shoulders of a tight end and the breakaway speed of a wide receiver. Some sports magazines had named him the best high school wide receiver in the country. He'd turned down scholarship offers to Southern California and Notre Dame, instead selecting a school that played its last bowl game after the 2001 season.

Benn picked Illinois because he believed Zook's coaching staff recruited the best young talent in the country. Offensive coordinator Mike Locksley, a Ballou graduate, had lured nine players from the Washington area since arriving in 2005. The Illinois coaches considered Benn one of the best recruits in the program's recent history, and they believed he could accelerate the team's progression.

Only the playbook's complexity, Benn believed, blocked that path.

At 4 p.m. on his first day of class, Benn left the meeting with his academic adviser and walked down the hall for what some of his teammates referred to as "football class." Benn stepped into a small conference room. Chris Pazan, a graduate assistant coach, walked in and handed him a six-inch-thick blue binder that had been overstuffed with paper.

"Your playbook," Pazan said. "Pretty soon, you'll know it inside and out."

Benn nodded and then gazed up at the walls of the conference room. On each square foot of wall space, coaches had diagrammed an offensive play using orange and blue magnets. About 170 plays covered all four walls, a sea of more than 2,000 magnets. In seven months, Benn would need to know the exact position of each one.

Pazan told Benn that, for now, they would meet in the conference room four times each week, for about 90 minutes each session, to study the offense. Benn wondered out loud if that would give him enough time. The Fighting Illini run a no-huddle, shotgun offense that aims to confuse defenses by moving quickly. On the field, Benn would have no time cushion for recollection.

"Can we meet more than that?" Benn asked. "I need to have this down."

"We'll do two-a-days soon," Pazan said. "We'll meet once in the morning and once at night."

"Will there be quizzes?" Benn asked.

"Yeah," Pazan said. "I'll make tests for you."

Benn walked out 10 minutes later, the playbook under his arm, and changed into workout clothes in the locker room. He rushed to the indoor practice facility to catch passes out of an automatic throwing machine, talked briefly with his girlfriend -- I'm busy. I gotta call you back. I really gotta call you back.-- and ate a quick dinner with two dozen teammates. Just before 7 p.m., Benn entered a small theater in the basement of the football complex for a mandatory team meeting.

Benn switched chairs three times in the theater because he wasn't sure if the wide receivers needed to sit together. Finally, he settled into an aisle seat and grabbed another protein bar from his backpack. Zook walked to the microphone at the center of the stage, and Benn leaned forward. His eyelids sagged, but he needed to pay attention. He could sleep later. Maybe in the players' lounge.

"We've got something special going on right now, men," Zook said. "We're cooking with gas. I hope you feel it. This thing is getting ready to take off. You know it. I know it.

"As you guys know, I like to break down the year into six phases. Obviously, this one right now is kind of an easy one. I hope you guys are enjoying it, because pretty soon things are going to heat up. Pretty soon, it's going to get busy."

[Water Pony]

Fighting Illini are on the rise!

But the message for elite high school student?/athletes everywhere is to get into college fast, punch your ticket (especially in BB) fast and go pro. Unfortuntately, less than .5% get that opportunity and the balance miss the chance to mature on schedule, while getting a degree and pursuing a real career.

Media add to the issue.

Oh well, reality is a b*tch.

[ponyte]

There is something to be said for reporting in the fall. The campus is empty and there is time to concentrate on just football. The change in the game (work ethic, size, speed, complexity, etc.) is somewhat of a daunting prospect without trying to settle into a dorm, find one's way around campus and so forth. Also, in the fall, there are a bunch of other 'fresh' freshman so there is some commonality with others as one discovers new buildings, classrooms and experiences.

There are pluses and minuses to everything. One the whole, enjoy those last few months as a HS senior. I know I did!