Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Dual threat
Dolphins rookie’s talent, drive can’t be exaggerated.
“From the time I was a little kid, I wanted to be a professional athlete. But I haven’t done anything yet.” Mike Gesicki
The football coach says he’s had no better athlete. The basketball coach says he’s had no harder worker. The volleyball coach at South Regional (N.J.) High School says Mike Gesicki only played the sport two months each year but carried them to two state titles and two state runner-up finishes.
“He was dominant when he arrived as a freshman and Player of the Year in New Jersey volleyball as a senior,” said his coach, Eric Maxwell. Here’s the kicker: “I never even played volleyball until high school,” Gesicki said.
Does this help any? Does it begin to explain the unusual athlete the Miami Dolphins got in their rookie tight end, a position that embraces an athlete and cultivates the unusual?
You can see this other ways. You can listen to a scout on another AFC team say, “His athleticism jumps off the film at you in a way few players do.” You can read Penn State offensive coordinator Ricky Rahne’s response to video on the Miami Dolphins’ Twitter account of a twisting, falling, one-handed touchdown catch by Gesicki in practice: “I’m not even sure that makes his Top 20.”
You can see no player had a higher vertical jump at the NFL Draft Combine this year than Gesicki’s 41.5 inches. And no player was taller than his 6-foot-6 frame. Add those together and …
“He’s a big target,” Dolphins quarterback Ryan Tannehill said.
He doesn’t stop, too. That’s what they’ve noticed about Gesicki at the Dolphins so far, too. He never stops, ever, taking a whiteboard to his room to study
plays, arriving early to work out, giving a full morning’s practice and staying after catching balls off the jugs machine as the last player on the field.
“Get used to that,” Maxwell said. “He would often ask, when we had an away match, ‘Coach, what time do you think we’ll get back?’ ” The minute we got back he’d go in the weight room. This was 8, 9 o’clock at night. The school would be empty except for the custodians. I’d leave. He’d be in there lifting weights. That’s who he is.”
“We went to Disney his senior year for a basketball tournament,” said Gesicki’s high school basketball coach, Eric Fierro. “We were loading the luggage and someone pulled out a 5- or 10-pound tub from Mike’s luggage. ‘What the heck is this?’ It was protein powder.
“We’d be hanging out at the pool. Mike would come out with a protein shake after his second weight workout of the day in the hotel. He had to get them in.”
“He’s the kind of kid you’d have to throw him out of the weight room or tell him, ‘No, not today,’ once in a while for his own good,” South Regional’s football coach Chuck Donohoe, said. “Work ethic? It wasn’t just sports. He waited tables at a Mexican restaurant in the summers all through high school.”
Donohoe first spotted a seventh-grade Gesicki punting a ball on a field, running down the field for the ball, then punting it back. Yes, Gesicki was a punter in high school, too. And a linebacker. It was as receiver he changed games, though.
“Every team doublecovered him,” Donohoe said. “It was hard to get the ball to him some games, but the bigger the game, the bigger he came up. Big, clutch catches, particularly in the goal-line area.”
To understand Gesicki’s talent, consider when asked for his most athletic feat, he says either a 360-degree dunk in a high school game or high-jumping 6 feet in eighth grade. The winning high jump at the Florida Class 4A high school meet this spring was 6 feet, 1.6 inches.
“He can jump like you’ve probably never seen,” Donohoe said. “You can throw it up there, and he can get it.”
At Penn State, he celebrated a touchdown by jumping over his standing quarterback. He jumped over a teammate in a high school dunk contest (he won). In a high school All-Star game, he threw a free throw off the glass, beat everyone in the lane and reverse-dunked the ball. Other video has him shooting step-back threepointers or dribbling the length of the court in traffic for lay-ups.
“Mike’s a freak athlete,” Fierro said. “He came in dunking as an eighth grader. I remember a conversation with him as a freshman, telling him he could do anything he wanted and he said, ‘I want to play basketball for North Carolina.’ ”
That changed when his football talent developed. But there were growing pains in college when, as he said, “things that worked for me in high school weren’t working. I wasn’t making plays. I wasn’t playing.”
That’s the intro to the Dolphins. Growing pains are part of the process for any rookie. But Gesicki comes with the right idea. This summer, back at his high school roots, he spoke to the football team about joining the Dolphins.
“Me, right here,” he said, bending down putting his hand near the ground, “compared to where I want to be and where I want to go. From the time I was a little kid, I wanted to be a professional athlete. But I haven’t done anything yet.”