It’s hard to call what NFL players do between minicamp and training camp a “break.” As opposed to taking time off and getting away from the game of football, most players dedicate themselves to training and getting ready for the demanding camp process that begins late-July.
Some stay in their team city to work and stay close, while others go to popular training destinations like Miami, Fla. or Southern California. Others, like New Orleans Saints cornerback Kool-Aid McKinstry, return home to reconnect with their roots.
For the third-year cornerback, this is an important part of the process. He continues to work with the coaches and trainers that helped him grow into a starting NFL cornerback and he reminds himself of the work it took to get there all in one, weeks-long, grueling grind.
And he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I like to go back to my roots and train,” he told LouisianaSports.Net about his offseason plans. “I feel like it brings a lot out of me, going back to where I trained at when I first started. Running those same hills, working with those same coaches on my game, and I feel like those are the same coaches that helped me get to where I’m at now.”
With the Alabama heat seared into his memory, McKinstry recounted one of his most vivid memories of training in his hometown of Birmingham, Ala. A hill, a 15-year-old McKinstry and a dream.
“I remember we was at the park, and we had to run this hill,” he said. “That probably was like my toughest workout I can really, really remember, I was like 15, running that hill, and I had to run it 20 times. That day was tough. It was hot. Very, very hot. So it just killed me.”
That experience is one that McKinstry keeps close. Many athletes work their entire careers to realize the big, seemingly unattainable at times, hopes and ambitions of their childhoods.
It’s clear that this still serves as motivation for the Saints cornerback as he works to keep the memory of that younger self central to his process. McKinstry’s goal doesn’t come off as one that’s trying to distance himself from his past, but instead as one that’s trying to make that young kid, the one running up a hill at a park 20 times in the agonizing southern summer heat, proud.
“I kind of like talking to myself now and trying to make myself think like that eight-year-old kid did,” he said. “I try to refer back to the eight-year-old memory that I had, and that grind, and that push, and that want-to, and that hunger. I try to put my mindset back in those stages, back to those labors, so I can be who I want to be when I come back to training camp.”
McKinstry values his past, but he focuses on something different. Not just one that seeks to live a dream and chase accomplishments, but instead one that is striving to prove something to himself.
Instead of chasing a chance to prove that he’s arrived, he’s busy letting his younger self remind him that he hasn’t yet. That source of motivation is one that could drive the Alabama native from his past to a breakout future. Central to his pursuit of that is his younger self reminding him that he’s not done.
“‘Keep your head down, you ain’t there yet,’” McKinstry said as the message from his eight-year-old self. “‘You ain’t there until you put the helmet up,’ that’s what eight-year-old me is telling me now. “‘Keep going until the helmet is hung all the way up.’”
