GREEN BAY, Wis. -- P.J. Fleck didn’t invent juggling -- according to juggling.org it dates back more than 4,000 years -- but he may have introduced it to the NFL.
At the very least, he’s responsible -- albeit indirectly -- for bringing it to the Green Bay Packers via first-year receivers coach Luke Getsy.
This offseason, Getsy introduced several new drills -- juggling tennis balls, juggling footballs, dropping and catching bricks among others -- to Randall Cobb, Davante Adams and the rest of the Packers’ receivers.
If Fleck walked into a Packers training camp practice and was asked how many of those drills Getsy got from him, his answer would be, “It sounds like most of them,” Fleck said.
So where did Fleck get them?
The juggling came from an unlikely source for a football player.
“When I was a player with the 49ers, I was one of those guys that had to stay after,” said Fleck, the head coach at Western Michigan University who was on San Francisco’s roster, practice squad and/or injured reserve in 2004 and 2005. “You’d see all these athletes, and they could do so many things. Most great athletes can juggle. When I was at San Francisco, I didn’t know many San Jose Sharks but I would watch different videos about goalie reactionary drills. I would do those. I would juggle. I would do things that are against a wall. You face a wall and the ball comes off at a rapid speed, and you’d have to react to it.
“I would always work on things I could do to get my hand-eye coordination better because I ran a 4.8-[second] 40-[yard dash] and I was 5-foot-9. I played for two-and-a-half years, but I had to keep myself in the league somehow. Most of these drills were invented during that time.”
Gesty worked under Fleck at Western Michigan as the Broncos’ receivers coach in 2013 before Packers coach Mike McCarthy brought him to Green Bay as an offensive assistant in 2014. McCarthy handed the receivers to Getsy this offseason.
As soon as the players came back for the start of the offseason program, they knew Getsy would challenge them in ways like never before.
Cobb said he appreciates the way Getsy has “kept things fresh” even if it cost him a little cash from his own wallet. Cobb had to replace a brick he broke when he was unable to hang onto it during a practice this spring.
“We still have that same brick. It’s sitting in the bag all chunked up,” said receiver Jeff Janis, who claims he hasn’t dropped one yet.
There’s another drill Getsy took from Fleck. At one offseason practice, Getsy could be seen throwing over-the-shoulder passes from atop a staircase to receivers below him on one knee.
“We do that here; we did that at Rutgers,” Fleck said. “I did that at Tampa with Vincent Jackson and Mike Williams. I used to go up on a lift. It saves their legs but you get hundreds of over-the-shoulders catches. There’s so many different types of catches that come up during the game, so you’ve got to put them in all those positions, and you’re not going to have them stay after the season and run 50 go routes. You’ve got to find ways to manipulate the situation to simulate the work.”
After practice one day last week, Getsy had his receivers catch balls off the JUGS machine with their hands just inches from where the ball is released.
“We call that ‘Man Hands,’” Fleck said. “Stick your hands inside a JUGS machine going 70 miles per hour; if you can catch that, then you can probably catch a ball you see coming.”
Another new one this summer during training camp has receivers covering one eye and then other while playing catch with a tennis ball.
“Again, it’s just eye-hand coordination, training each eye,” Getsy said. “That’s all. We’re all eye dominant, and you’re just training the dominant eye and you’re training the less-dominant eye.”
It has become such a part of Getsy’s identity as a coach that he opened his session with reporters last week by asking: “Who’s got the first tennis ball question for me?”