Picking the Orange
His Brookfield Central basketball team's season having been canceled the day before playing for a chance to go to state, in-person classes shut down for the foreseeable future and coronavirus cases fast on the rise as the pandemic swept its way through the country in mid-March, Hayden Nelson looked over at his dad, Brian, and asked a question.
“We're going to be stuck in here for a while, aren't we?”
The answer was a resounding “yes”, which, of course, turned out to be rather prudent.
“I said back to him that we've got to figure something out for how I'm going to work out if I'm at home for however long,” Nelson said.
Without a gym to go to and his son now on his own for workouts, Brian scoured online for weight room equipment that they could set up in their basement. Craigslist turned up a high school in Illinois that was getting rid of its old benches and squat racks, so father and son drove down to pick them up.
It turned out to be a wise investment. Some five months later, Nelson has emerged for his senior season at Brookfield Central, where he is a standout defensive end, retooled physically and hoping for a dominant season.
Sticking to a consistent regimen
Nelson didn't have his normal 5:45 a.m. weight room session at the high school to wake up for, so he started his days around 9 a.m. He spent some time reading his Bible and eating breakfast before heading into workout number one of the day. Nelson would warm up by running a mile and then throw a work up a heavy sweat following a P90X workout video on the TV. After that came a P90X core session.
“That was every single day for 13, 14 weeks,” Nelson said.
Nelson wanted to hone in on his flexibility for all of the bending and dipping that he does from his defensive end position, so he followed each P90X session with lots of stretching.
Homework and an hour of relaxation offered a brief respite for Nelson. After that he would head back to the basement and spend an hour lifting weights using the equipment from Craigslist.
Add in a revamped diet – Nelson says he ate chicken almost every day for three months while cutting down on unhealthy foods – and the senior lost about 20 pounds off of his 240-pound frame before eventually adding 15 back on as muscle.
“Physically, he just looks completely different this year,” Brookfield Central coach Joel Nellis said. “You can tell he's been dedicated in that area.”
The hardest part of sticking to his solo workout regimen, Nelson says, was the fact that he had no certainty about whether he will get to have a senior season.
“I was putting in this work, but nothing was guaranteed,” he said. “The season could have been canceled at any second. Throughout most of that, there were no set plans on having a season at any moment.”
The most common interruption to Nelson's quarantine schedule was his iPhone.
While the rest of the world was working from home and adapting to a new way of life, so were college coaches. For them, that meant calling and FaceTiming recruits for much of the day.
“Throughout quarantine, it was hectic,” Nelson said. “We're all stuck at home and (coaches) had no team to coach, so they had nothing to do but recruit. I would be busy in the basement and have coaches FaceTime me, but I made sure to answer every call from every conference. It was great to be in that spot, but it took up a lot of time.”
With reported scholarship offers from 17 schools and many of them still heavily recruiting him, Nelson decided in late April that he was ready to settle things down and commit. Soon after, he
Brookfield Central's Hayden Nelson (9) had an intense training regimen during quarantine.
committed to Syracuse.
“I had developed some really great relationships with the staff there, to the point where it didn't feel like a coachplayer relationship, but really like they were going to take me in as their family,” Nelson said.
Nelson held Power 5 offers from Indiana and Iowa State. He had also received interest from Iowa, Michigan State, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, but none of them ever offered him.
“That's really where I found the most motivation,” Nelson said. “Everyone sees the offers, but nobody sees the nos. My dad and I would get up at 4 or 5 and drive to the Wisconsin, Oklahoma and it was always, ‘(You're) a little too short' or ‘We've got one guy higher on the board right now.' It was always motivating.
“Now, though, that I'm committed I'm focusing on proving myself right more than proving them wrong.” seeing two or three blockers on nearly every play as a junior. That resulted in a dip in Nelson's personal numbers, but freed up other defenders to clean up plays for a defense that allowed just 16 points per game.
“My sophomore year, I wasn't really known by anybody and so I kind of came out of nowhere and it benefited me a little bit,” Nelson said. “Junior year, I had a few offers coming in so my coaches told me from day one that I wasn't going make as many plays because I'd be seeing double teams.”
Nelson's highlight film still has no shortage of big plays. Strip-sacks. Blowing up rushing plays in the backfield. Blocking punts. Getting lateral to make a tackle on a sweep.
“He's a fast player,” Nellis said. “There's an element of power he's adding, but he's got this explosive first step off the ball.”
If Nelson can put it all together this fall, there will be no shortage of havoc being wreaked in opposing backfields.
It's something the Lancers are counting on.
“He's going to take a big jump this year,” Nellis said. “Whether it's production he didn't feel he had or just going out there and dominating on an everysnap basis, he's going to play his (butt) off and I wouldn't want to be on the other end.”