Camping days

 Out on the sunbaked grass here at Snider High School, the tykes in their bright yellow shirts are everywhere, running pass patterns, clustering around the water tent, chasing footballs arcing across the blue-white sky.

Sometimes they catch them. Sometimes ...

Well, just now a girl in pigtails, knee-high to a minute, takes off from the head of the line, kinda-sorta cuts behind the line of orange cones placed a few yards away, and reaches for the ball.

Which clears her head by, oh, ten feet or so, not being one of her instructor's better throws.

And she troops back to the line of yellow shirts, and the next kid lines up, and, lord, this is 1994 or '95 or '96 all over again. The morning sun beats down like a hammer, promising a molten afternoon. Sweat pops up on your forehead and begins to speckle your shirt here and there. And you're not even moving.

Feels exactly the way you remember Rod Woodson's football camp. Which is back here at Snider again this week, after all these years.

This time it's under the aegis of Woodson's foundation, Hope Through Football, whose signage is everywhere this steamy Tuesday. And it's not '94 or '95 or '96 anymore, because there is gray in the goatee of the man down at one of the field here at Snider, who happens to be Rod Woodson himself.

Just now he's pacing off a few yards from a small cluster of yellow shirts. Then he stops and places a water bottle on the grass.

"This is my water bottle," he tells the shirts. "Don't ... touch ... my water."

What they're supposed to do is practice taking handoffs, bolt off the line and then cut past the water bottle. One by one, they do it, holding one arm high and one arm low to take the handoff as instructed, making cuts alternately flashy and not so, imagining ...

What? 

That they're lugging the mail for Snider or North Side or Dwenger or Luers a few years down the road?

That they're Jonathan Taylor or Christian McCaffery or Derrick Henry in the pros?

That the next water break is just a few minutes away?

Something like that.

In any case, there are 200 or so of the yellow shirts here today, and it takes me right back to the first incarnation of Woodson's camp, which I covered from its inception for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. An estimated 10,000 kids participated between 1994 and 2007, and some of them went on to star at their local high schools.  And some went on to play in college, and some, yes, became the pros they imagined being, taking handoffs or chasing footballs across the sky on those seared summer days.

It is impossible to tell which of the yellow shirts taking handoffs and cutting smartly and otherwise on this seared summer day have Friday night or Saturday or Sunday stardom in their future. Just as it's impossible to tell what lessons they will take from this week to make any of that possible. 

But you know what?

You couldn't tell then, either. And yet it happened, and some piece of it likely happened because of a certain week under the summer sun.

So welcome back.