Football lessons for life

BEVERLY -- Technically, there are still 41 days until the Beverly High School football team kicks off its season.

The Pop Warner season doesn't start for a couple of weeks.

But if you were out on Sohier Road any afternoon last week, you would have heard the pads popping outside the field house at Beverly High.

Andre Tippett loves it all: the grass stains, the drills, the kids suiting up -- a lot of them putting on helmets and pads for the first time.

The former New England Patriots All-Pro linebacker has been retired for 14 years, but he never completely left the game. Not too long after calling it a career in 1993, he accepted a position with the Patriots in community affairs. These days, he works for the Patriots through the NFL's Junior Development Program, created to teach football skills to boys ages 12 to 14.

The camp in Beverly, in its second year, attracted 110 aspiring players from towns throughout the region last week, roughly equal to last year's turnout.

But Tippett sees the program as offering more than football.

"I made my name, and who I am, as a ballplayer," said the 47-year-old Tippett. "Out here, when I talk, I talk from experience. You look back on leadership, work ethic, perseverance, accountability, all of these things we learned as players on the football field."

After the first day of the camp Monday, one parent walked by Tippett with her two sons.

She did the requisite double take as she passed the 6-foot-3, 200-pound-plus Tippett and asked, "You're an old NFL guy, right?

"Yes, ma'am" he told her.

"What's your name again?"

"Andre Tippett," he said.

"Yeah! Yeah!" she said, motioning to her kids. "Andre Tippett. You remember him, don't you? Shake his hand. Maybe some of that will rub off."

He's hoping more than football will rub off. At the start of the camp, before they hit the field, Tippett talked to the kids sitting on the bleachers, but not about the glory years, the Pro Bowl games, or the Patriots Hall of Fame honors.

His message centered on the life skills he learned through football that he would have otherwise lost out on.

Tippett grew up in Newark, N.J., a child of the '60s, when the city was hot with race riots. Football camps like this one weren't even an option. And because he was always a big kid, weight limits kept him off the youth football fields. So he didn't even start playing organized football until he was in high school.

And even then it wasn't exactly a smooth transition.

He remembers how he tried out for the football team as a freshman at Barringer High School because all his friends were trying out. They all made the team. He was cut.

He was fuming, not because he didn't make it, but because his friends who did make it quit two weeks later.

"That was something I really wanted," he said.

So for the next year, he worked to make the team the next time around.

"I found something I was good at," he said. "I found a role model, bonding, belonging, mentoring, self-assurance, all of that out of one year of getting cut."

And that's what he tried to get across to the kids.

There are tons of camps out there, run by colleges as moneymakers and recruiting tools.

But the Beverly camp wasn't about developing into a college football star. It's about the NFL creating more football players and at the very least, more football fans.

"The NFL was concerned there was a gap in terms of kids playing the game in middle school and continuing on through high school and they wanted to bridge that gap," said Beverly High's head coach and the camp director, Dan Bauer, who also did not play youth football. "It's also designed to cater to the player that never played before."

Bauer said you'll likely see a kid, normally a lineman, lining up at wide receiver or running back, much to their delight.

"They love it because they don't get the ball much," Bauer said.

Camps get the rap of being cash-eating pressure cookers as parents shell out hundreds of dollars to take their kids from one clinic to the next. But done the right way, the camps can have positive results.

"Teaching children about sports is just one way to encourage their self-esteem and self-perception," said William Harper, head of Purdue University's department of health and kinesiology and director of the school's National Youth Sports Program, which conducted a study last year on summer sports camps.

"They enjoy themselves," said Bauer, who would like to have the program back next summer. "And they seem to be very happy, so that's a plus."

Given a chance to get back on the field and talk to young people about what football did for his life, Tippett was just as pleased.

"I want them to enjoy the moment, try to take something from it," Tippett said. "Figure out who you are."