LITTLE BIT EXTRA
Broncos safety finds strength in his conditioning routine — back to high school
He can laugh about it now, but it was less funny when dinner hour loomed and the ladies watching his kids started texting, wondering when the heck Charles Kenyon was coming to pick them up.
“One more set, Coach,” Justin Simmons would plead between biceps curls. “One more set.”
And Kenyon, the football coach in Martin County, Fla., would look up at the clock at the weight room. Then he’d ponder the unholy bite that day-care late fees were about to take out of his checking account.
“Justin, I’ve got to go home and cook for my kids, man. I don’t have time for this.” The curls continued.
“One more set, Coach,” Kenyon’s two-way star would reply. “One more set.”
“It would get close to dinner time,” Kenyon said of Simmons, his former protégé, now a linchpin of the Broncos’ secondary. “We would have workouts, and you don’t want your children to be the last ones picked up.
“I don’t really remember the time frame, if it was 6 p.m., but I do know that they were in there all the time.” One more set, Coach. One more set.
“It’s just doing everything that they ask of you here, getting with our strength staff and doing that little bit extra,” said Simmons, the third-year Broncos safety who’ll help lead the defense into Los Angeles against the Chargers (7-2) on Sunday.
“And doing it knowing that nine times out of 10, you’ll be playing every snap. Asking them what are some things you can do stretch-wise that’ll keep your legs fresh. Getting in the training room as much as you can. Not everyone’s an ice tub guy. (It’s) just whatever works for you. It’s just finding that routine and sticking with it.”
That little bit extra accrues, over time, like compound interest. In a season that’s seen blankety-blank injuries take up too much of the dang narra--
tive already, No. 31 keeps on trucking, the only Broncos player to appear on every defensive snap.
“That is a stat,” the former Boston College star said with a laugh. “I didn’t know that. I guess I wouldn’t really know unless someone told me. Yeah, that’s crazy. That’s a lot of snaps. I don’t want to even ask how many.”
According to Footballoutsiders.com, the meter sits at 594 — and counting. The site lists the Broncos’ third-round pick in the 2016 draft as just one of eight NFL defenders to tote a 100 percent participation rate.
“He’s one player that I personally do not want to have off the football field,” chuckled safeties coach Marcus Robertson, who knows the drill, having spent 12 seasons in the secondary of the Houston Oilers/tennessee Titans and the Seattle Seahawks. “Because of the fact that I feel like, at any given moment, he can change a football game.”
Simmons rolls into the weekend leading the Broncos in picks (two) and ranking second on the roster in total tackles (50) and in solo tackles (41) and the consensus among he and Robertson is that the surface hasn’t even really been scratched yet. The pair set a goal before the season to try to get Simmons’ impact stats — interceptions, fumble recoveries, sacks, etc. — to total double digits after the safety in 2017 recorded five pass breakups, two picks and a sack.
“We haven’t thrown that out, by any stretch of the imagination,” Robertson said. “Now it’s just up to me, because he’s got all the ability. And what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to get him in position to make more plays on the ball. He should be, and is, in my opinion, a bona-fide playmaker in this league.”
In the immortal words of John Fox, you can’t make the club from the tub.
Wait. Or can you?
“I take Epsom salt baths,” Simmons said. “I have a whole bunch of relaxation stuff, in terms of oils. My wife is a big essential oils person, so she does all that stuff.”
For the most part, though, it’s not about some ancient secret. It ain’t rocket science.
You stretch.
You grind.
Mostly, you just ball.
“If you’re thinking about getting injured, that’s when you get injured,” Simmons said. “While you’re out there, you’re just going hard every snap. There are obviously times you’re out there for an extended period of time, you get winded. And that nine times out of 10, is where most injuries happen.
“So while you’re at practice, you try to push yourself to the limits of making yourself tired each practice so you just keep building your conditioning. There are a whole bunch of different things that you do, but that’s stuff we try to do as a secondary so we don’t get winded and you don’t lose your focus and concentration.”
That little bit extra goes back almost a decade now, to AAU basketball practices in Stuart, Fla., when coach Kindell Rivers winced as he saw Simmons, his star eighth-grader in the post, land funny during a drill.
“He wasn’t going to complain about an injury or whatever,” Rivers recalled. ”He was one of those guys where you had to take him off the field, take him off the court. If he had an ankle injury, he wasn’t going to go out there and not give it everything he had.
“He taped it up when he played and he just progressed and got better. Each year that he played any kind of sport, he kept getting better. Team first. There was no one bigger than the team.”
And sometimes, when nature and nurture sing in unison, the rest has a way of taking care of itself. Simmons’ father Victor played football at West Virginia Wesleyan, and the pair could be seen running along the beaches five or so miles from Martin County High, a workout that for Justin produced more explosiveness — more quick twitch — with each step.
“There were times he would take shots, but he would never take one flush,” Kenyon recalled. “You could never get a (clean) shot on him.
“The great ones, the ones that make it to the NFL, those are the ones that have that knack of not taking on a full-time hit.”
The great ones have a way. “We ask a lot of him, he embraces it, and he’s playing really, really well for us,” Robertson said. “The thing is, for me and him, is, we want to see more ball production. He’s got to understand how valuable he is to us. Although the numbers aren’t where they should be — in my opinion and his — it’s not too late. We’ve just got to be patient.”
One more set, Coach. One more set.
“I guess if you look at it that way,” Simmons said, “I’ve been counting my blessings for a while.”