There are few technique drills at Cousins' camp, which purposely excludes most of the drudgery and take-a-knee lectures that bored the quarterback during the camps he attended. Later, as an impromptu dance contest breaks out, he says to a camper, "Never lose that self-confidence." "Do not fumble my football," Cousins deadpans into a microphone, in between offering play-by-play of games between sixth graders. The main job at this hour, though, is blowing up a dozen 5-foot-high inflatable bubbles that will be used for games of KnockerBall, where campers step inside the bubbles, collide with each other in an effort to retrieve a football, then run it back across an end line. Athletic trainers from Hope College fill water jugs and unpack boxes of sports drinks to deal with the 90-degree heat, while placing bottles of sunscreen in ready view of the campers who'd otherwise underestimate its importance. on the first day of Cousins' camp, staffers are hard at work making preparations for the 360 middle schoolers who will arrive later that morning. They give him a hard time, and we mess around I don't think we hold him to any different standard than we hold ourselves."īefore 7 a.m. "It's a safe place where Kirk can come back and just be himself.
"There's a dynamic where, because knew Kirk before he was in the NFL, that's how they treat him," Kyle Cousins said. Even when Cousins is the center of attention, his status is not the North Star. But the contract, the pressure - all of it - is filtered through a world view that was formed here, in the midst of friends and family who share his Christian beliefs.
He understands, with bracing clarity, what's being asked of him, and how directly his perception in Minnesota will be tied to his production. It becomes clear why Cousins seems so unfazed by the expectations attached to his mammoth contract. Kirk Cousins' name is on the camp, but he blends in as often as not with the crowd, dispensing high-fives and life advice to middle schoolers, putting his arm around a teary-eyed camper and leaning forward to the edge of Smith Stadium's metal bleachers as he listens intently to what his father and brother have to say. The next morning, after the group shares laughs and trades jabs over the dodgeball clip, Cousins' older brother Kyle gets the last speaking spot for morning devotionals, sharing what he's learned after quitting a job with the Orlando Magic, studying in Jerusalem and sorting out what he should be doing with his life. He opens the camp by detailing for roughly two dozen coaches how his arrival in Minnesota was the product of answered prayer, before turning things over to his father Don. Here in Cousins' bucolic west Michigan hometown, he is just Kirk, the middle of a pastor's three kids, the once-scrawny quarterback who earned straight A's at Holland Christian High School and split his time between sports and Living Hope, the school's competitive show choir. His name is attached to contract figures punctuated by exclamation points -$84 million over three years! The first fully guaranteed contract for an NFL quarterback! - and followed by a question mark - Is he worth it? In much of the country, Cousins is a talking point.
"I kept waiting for somebody to pick me up and pull me back out, but nobody did!" Cousins answered his high school buddies, his eyes widening in mock indignation as a grin crossed his face. This was no X's-and-O's breakdown at the Vikings' practice facility - a video clip of the previous night's dodgeball game at Cousins' youth camp had made its way to ESPN's "SportsCenter." This - as Cousins congregated with several of his oldest friends before Day 2 at Hope College - was a roast. Now it was time to account for what went wrong. In this particular clip, Cousins could see he had made a strong step-up through a wall of blockers and delivered a strike, slipping away from contact after he followed through.īut after going to the ground to avoid the yellow dodgeball whizzing by his head, he had to Army-crawl through a handful of his friends to return to the back line, as several more throws missed his neon green Nikes. – The last Saturday in June for Kirk Cousins began with him crouched over a smartphone, poring over video in search of clues for how he can improve - the way many of his days will start in Minnesota.
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