Colts Defensive Tackle Goes Balls To The Wall, Damages Team Gym
In 2018 the Colts revamped their training complex, including the weight room.
In 2019 Colts defensive tackle & free agent Jihad Ward went medicine-balls to the wall on it, leaving a bit of a hole.
Ward, who’s been with the team since September of last year, seems to have taken it in stride along with a trainer who slinks away as they laugh.
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This is a gent who’s clearly working hard & not skipping arm day. I can’t say the same for myself, even though I believe I’ve been paying for an unused gym membership in the Philly ‘burbs for about 3 years now.
Going through his Twitter & seeing how well-liked & positive he is, I couldn’t help but go down a rabbit hole. Rewinding through his career from his current spot with the Colts, to the Cowboys, & before that, the Raiders, and even before his time playing at the University of Illinois, he took the field for NYC’s Globe Technical Institute not far from Barstool HQ.
This blurb from a 2016 Sports Illustrated profile highlighted to me how far he’s come to be able to train in an NFL team gym:
Before coming to play defensive end for the Illini, the north Philadelphia native spent two years at Globe Institute of Technology (GIT), a junior college whose campus is situated in New York City’s Garment District only a short stroll from Times Square.
His first semester in Champaign, Ward’s walk to practice consisted of the seven-block stretch between Bromley Hall and Memorial Stadium. That’s the same distance from the 28th Street stop on the 1 Train to the Manhattan Mini Storage on the borough’s west side that housed Globe Tech’s practice equipment between sessions.
Globe Tech Football kept their equipment in a Mini Storage, and it was even more of a pain in the ass from there…
At Illinois, the jaunt from Bromley was the entirety of his daily commute. In New York, snagging his pads from a storage locker was just one leg of an 11.5-mile trip from his school-provided townhouse on Staten Island to practice at the Chelsea Ballfields, which were occasionally unavailable because of a youth soccer practice. Getting there meant a short bus ride, a trip across the Upper Bay aboard the Staten Island Ferry, a quick shot on the 1 through Manhattan, and finally, that relative breeze of a seven-block walk.
When practice ended, Ward and the Knights lugged their gear back to storage before trudging nearly a mile down 29th Street to a Bally’s Total Fitness near Penn Station for a lift and a shower. Clean but exhausted, they stumbled to classes at Globe, which often ended around 9 p.m. From there, it was a short walk to the 42nd Street station, a subway ride to the ferry, and finally, the slow float back to Staten Island. In all, it was a 24.5-mile round-trip commute—nearly three of those miles on foot—and around 200 minutes in transit over a five-day week.
You can read more of that profile HERE, and if you do, you won’t be able to keep from rooting for the guy. Hope the Colts pick him up for another season and if they need anyone to help fix that wall, I know a guy.