Onlinemen
Papas takes football clinic into virtual space amid pandemic
Unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. John Papas understands that. A member of the Massachusetts High School Football Coaches Hall of Fame and founder of the highly successful New England Elite Football Clinic, Papas was at a crossroads. The coronavirus pandemic effectively eliminated any prospects of running his clinics for a 27th year.
“Not in a million years can you expect something like this to happen,” Papas said. “There’s a saying in the business which states that coaches are like gazelles in the jungle. You wake up and start the day running, the day you stop running, you die.”
As much as Papas wanted to continue running his clinic, he wasn’t about to put anyone in harm’s way. After talking it over with members of his staff, they came to the conclusion that a virtual clinic might work — hence the beginning of the Elite Football Virtual Clinic.
“This product will probably mirror as close to what we do in person,” Papas said. “What we’ve been able to accomplish the past 26 years was to provide a good football experience for everyone and there’s no way we could duplicate that. What we’re trying to do here is provide a platform for college coaches to attend, evaluate and recruit the kids.”
For someone like Papas, who has always been someone who loves being in the trenches with his players, this new-age clinic approach was a bit of a culture shock.
“The toughest part is not having that interaction with the coaches, kids and their parents,” Papas said. “It’s something we’ve done for a long time and been very successful. We were getting ready to start our clinics in Florida, Los Angeles and D.C. I was really jacked, the juices were flowing.”
Once the plan was to go virtual, Papas and his staff went full-throttle. With recruiting nonexistent, one of the main goals was to have campers showcase their skills on video and then give the coaches an opportunity to assess their skills.
They devised a Blitz Package, a system whereby a camper’s information would be readily available to more than 500 college and prep school coaches. Included in the data would be their Hudl video, an academic video, a combine video, a positional video and a personal interview, all under the supervision of Papas and his veteran staff.
“We’ll work with the kids, show them how to perform the drills that the coaches are looking for,” Papas said. “Things like positional skills, bench press, running the 40, shuttle run, quickness drill. We’ll show the kids how they should be filming themselves. Then we’ll post an interview of the player talking about himself, what his goals are and what he’s looking for in a college program.
“Once we have all that, we’ll post it onto our secure site and the college coaches will have access to all of it. It will allow coaches to start recruiting a kid who fits the need of their program.”
The initial reaction has been promising. According to Papas, more than 75% of the players who had originally signed up for the New England Elite Football Clinic switched their enrollment over to the virtual clinic.
“I’m pleasantly surprised, people have really embraced this,” Papas said. “I think people trust what we do. We’ve hired a lot of ex-college and high school coaches as well as guys with a lot of knowledge of the business. I think because people know what we do, we have a good shot of surviving.”