ASU football cornerback Joey Bryant and wide receiver Ryan Newsome are learning how to be two-sport athletes as both acquire skills to use in both sports.
In order to become elite nowadays, many believe it takes focusing on one sport from an early age to achieve their lofty goals.
That means ditching seasons.
The cliche of athletes, especially in high school, to go from football season in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring seems to be gone.
In college football, the regular season is followed up by spring practices and then after a short summer break, fall ball begins — creating a year-long football season.
Sun Devil cornerback Joey Bryant and wide receiver Ryan Newsome plan to go against that year-long football season this spring as the two plan to be apart of the ASU Track and Field team.
Bryant, a redshirt junior jumper, is not new to Division I track, but rather football.
He gave up his track scholarship in hopes of earning one in football. And whether that scholarship comes this year or not, the 6-foot-1, 180-pound Bryant will make an instant impact nonetheless.
The Liliha, Hawaii native has taken first-team reps at corner for over a week, grasping the system in a short time.
“I think Joey’s a guy that really has, man, he’s long, he’s tall for a corner, extremely fast, extremely gifted, he’s just raw,” Head coach Todd Graham said about Bryant. “And everyday he’s getting better and I love his demeanor.”
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Newsome on the other hand will be trying out collegiate track for the first time.
The Texas transfer last ran during his junior year in high school, putting up a personal-best time of 10.27 in the 100-meter.
“I’m a 100 guy,” Newsome said. “I know I’ll for sure I’ll run the 100, that’s my race and I think I can throw down some pretty crazy times in the 100. The 4×100, I’ll be running that too, after that I’ll be done.”
But there’s one thing about track that he’s not looking forward to.
Practice.
Bryant has seen, first hand, how grueling track practice can be sprinters and seemed to convey that rather bluntly to Newsome.
“He was telling me like ‘when you come up to track practice, you gonna die bro,” Newsome said. “Like you gonna die the first couple days.’”
“Sprinting training is, whoa, it’s hard, for real,” Bryant said. “I’ll just be jumping and watching them and they be dying, throwing up, like wobbling.”
For Bryant as a jumper, track practice is a different story — he has it relatively easy. At most, he has to run 60 meters at a time, jump, rest then repeat.
So when he was asked how the football practices compared to the track practices, he didn’t hesitate with his answer.
“What,” Bryant questioned emphatically? “It’s way harder.”
One thing that makes it harder is covering speedy receivers such as Newsome, giving Bryant, with his great speed, a run for his money.
“I can run past anybody, really,” Newsome said. “Then Joey, I go up against him so much that he knows what I’m going to do, so I got to work a lot harder to get open.”
Newsome mentioned how running track improves his speed for football season. Bryant is the same way — his jumping training translates to the gridiron, just as long as he puts himself in the right position.
“All training transitions somehow, but football is different,” Bryant said. “I’m backpedaling, so the only way I can use my jumping ability is if I put myself in a good position to go up for the ball and that’s what I’ve been working on.”
The two soon-to-be two-sport athletes understand the benefit that participating in track and field can have on their football skills, but it will be up to coach Graham as to what they do when there is a conflict of the two sports.
Because after all, football comes before track.
“There’s always a conflict between football and track and it’s up to Coach Graham,” Bryant said. ”In the spring, we’ll have to be here for spring football. So whatever meets are during that time, we won’t be at.
“And then it’s at our coach’s leisure if they want to let us go to track.”
Sometimes though, as Newsome found out this spring, even with a coach’s approval, the athlete may have to forego participating in track to focus on football season.
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“I was supposed to run the indoor season this year, but this spring, with the whole coaching change I had to get acclimated to them,” Newsome said. “Coach Graham wanted me to run indoor, but it just didn’t work out.”