Eskimos receivers help each other through camp
Gone are the days of Adarius Bowman taking young Edmonton Eskimos receivers under his wing.
With the veteran of 11 CFL seasons shuffling off to Winnipeg after a drop-off season that didn’t come anywhere close to his league-leading numbers from 2016, the duties of mother hen now fall to the rest of the roost.
“I’m going to have to say Adarius Bowman kind of took me under his wing,” said Derel Walker, recalling his rookie training camp in 2015. “I had to get more accustomed to how the game is being played. As a rookie, there was a lot of things being thrown at me that I wasn’t familiar with.
“I would say I just felt close to some of the older guys, Kenny Stafford was there and he’s back here now. Bryant Mitchell and I came in as rookies together.”
The biggest thing for first-timers to figure out early is hatching a plan to spend a lot of time with their new playbook.
“I just tried to get a whole bunch of different perspectives from different guys, their learning process toward plays,” Walker said. “Adarius helped a lot with that because he speaks into the mic and records everything and just listens to it through the headphones throughout the day.
“There are just a lot of things that you can do to make yourself more familiar with learning the playbook.”
Common sense dictates veterans shouldn’t help out up-and-comers too much, considering they are next in line for the same jobs. But it’s team-first in the Eskimos locker-room.
“The extra bodies we have, you just grab them under a wing and if they need help, you’re always out there trying to give them your best help because everybody’s competing,” said wide receiver Vidal Hazelton. “It’s not really a war between me and somebody else, at the end of the day you’ve got to put your skills out there and the coaches are going to make the best decision from there.”
Besides the Xs and Os of football, many of the fresh faces find themselves a long way from home as they adjust to a new city — and country.
“I’m going on my fourth year now, so I have learned throughout the years how to get myself ready and get going,” Walker said, adding Bowman’s wisdom has been replaced by a committee. “We do it as a group now. I speak with a lot of the receivers and we just pick each other’s brain. Kenny Stafford, Vidal Hazelton, Duke Williams, we check each other and hold each other accountable.”
Brandon Zylstra springboarded last year’s receiving title into a NFL contract with his home state Minnesota Vikings over the off-season, which begs the question: Who will become quarterback Mike Reilly ’s new favourite target?
“You’ve got to watch and find out, I guess,” Walker said.
“The sky’s the limit for our receiving corps, period. We’ve just got to pay attention to find out, I can’t really tell you. I can’t predict the future.
“I know what I have in mind for myself, but I always have big goals, big dreams. We’ve got the Grey Cup here in Edmonton, that’s one thing that’s kept me very motivated to challenge myself this year to get better as a man, as a football player and as a teammate.”
In four out the five seasons Reilly ’s been a CFL starter, he’s helped an Eskimos teammate lead the league in receiving yards, including Bowman twice.
But no one in this receiving corps is about to start counting chickens before they hatch.
“We’ve got a really good receiving corps and that’s the thing, nobody really has to be that guy, as long as everybody’s out there just doing their job and catching the football,” Hazelton said. “... Once you do that, everything ’s going to fall into place.”