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If everything works out, Sean Tucker’s goal is to run for Syracuse University’s track team.

The former high school track star said speed training, or “running linear,” is beneficial to him because those same techniques translate onto the football field.

“It gives him a way to kind of tap into the next gear, right, because he’s already fast,” said Dan Harper, Tucker’s high school track coach who’s continued to train him even after graduation.

Many football players at Calvert Hall (Maryland) College High School used track as conditioning for their primary sport, but Tucker wasn’t like the others. Running sprints was more than a “supplement” — he wanted to win because his nature wouldn’t allow the thought of losing, Harper said. That meant he was there to take conditioning, strength training, timing, relays and everything else very seriously. Both football and track were his top priorities, said Chris Lewis, a former track teammate who now runs collegiately at La Salle, and he was “all-in,” Harper said.

When he first started running at Calvert Hall, he had speed, but that talent was “raw,” said Kaelin Wade, who played football with Tucker since seventh grade and also ran track with him. Beginning in ninth grade, Tucker worked with Harper to hone and fine-tune his technique. He won the Maryland state title in the 55-meter for two consecutive years, among numerous other championships.

“He was a natural bullet,” Lewis said. “He did nothing but get faster since his freshman year.”

But Tucker’s aspirations to compete on SU’s indoor track team comes with caveats. They’ll depend on his health at the end of football season. They’ll have to be done in a way that’s non-detrimental to football, and there’s the matter of NCAA eligibility rules. He’ll have to balance a schedule with academics, spring football workouts, track competitions and more.

Tucker works with Harper when he returns home to Owings Mills, Maryland, and he knows enough to do track workouts on his own, his father Steve Tucker said. Those track workouts continued until August this year.

In football, Tucker has emerged as the focal point of the Orange’s offense in his second season. He put together one of the best rookie campaigns in SU program history during 2020, and through three games this season, he’s notched over 500 all-purpose yards and seven touchdowns. He’s 7 yards shy of 1,000 career rushing yards. SU fans are calling to give him the legendary No. 44 jersey that was worn by Jim Brown — who also ran track — Ernie Davis and Floyd Little. Tucker’s speed, elusiveness and acceleration are among the reasons he stands out, head coach Dino Babers said, and his aspirations to run in official track meets would further develop those attributes.

“It’s definitely in his mind,” Harper said of Tucker joining SU’s track team. “We have kicked the idea around.”

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Steve knew his son was fast before high school — the opponents could never catch him on the football field — but he had no actual times to base that speed on. Then he met Harper, Tucker’s then-JV football coach who was also the sprints, relays and hurdles coach for track.

Harper, who also trains professional athletes on the Baltimore Ravens and in MLB, recognized Tucker’s potential and encouraged him to join the track team. But at the start, he didn’t display his current speed. Wade recalled an improvement from 11.1 seconds in the 100-meter — an already impressive time as a freshman — to 10.7 or 10.8 by the start of Tucker’s sophomore year. Both Steve and Tucker largely credit Harper for the improvements.

“I have never seen a transformation like that,” Wade said.

That jump was the result of Harper working with Tucker to fine-tune his arm motions, controlling his breathing, exerting more force on the ground and extending his legs, Wade said. He learned to “train with a lactic threshold” by pushing through lactic buildup, Harper said. Tucker was a good starter because he’s explosive, but they worked on the intricate details until he came out of the starting blocks “like a cannon, a shotgun blast,” Harper said.

They did track-focused lifts with light weights and a high number of repetitions to emphasize explosivity. They did dynamic stretching and body weight exercises in the gym to create a balance between on-track and off-track workouts, Lewis said.

Hills were a “staple” of Harper’s workouts: they walked, ran, hopped, skipped, crawled, rolled and shuffled up hills, Lewis said. Harper didn’t change his workouts between the professionals he trained and his high school track athletes, Lewis added.

“Nothing gets you in shape like track workout conditioning,” Harper said.

Multiple times a week, Tucker would go from spring football practice to track practice, where he’d show up 30 minutes late but stay 30 minutes after, and then go to the weight room for a track lifting session. In a single track practice, they could do a “ladder” that started with a 100-meter sprint and increased by increments of 50-meters each time until it got to 300, and then climbed back down.

“It was just so much running and so much aerobic exercise that we just felt like we could do anything,” Wade said.

Tucker ran the 55, 100, 200, 300, 4×100 and 4×200. Like most other football players running track, Harper said shorter distances were “his money” because of his explosiveness and reliance on power and speed. Harper had to work with Tucker to get him into “track shape” to compete in the longer sprints. They touched on the three important areas: short speed, long speed (or speed endurance) and max velocity (or hitting one’s top speed). The 300-meter helps elongate the amount of time a sprinter like Tucker can hold his top speed.

Wade said the variety of new workouts was “refreshing” for him and the other football players, and since Harper was both a football and track coach, he made sure getting into track shape didn’t interfere with football shape.

But it was the mental side of track that perhaps proved the most valuable. It required Tucker to be “sharp, calm, collected, fierce and fearless,” Lewis said, all of which parallel qualities for a running back.

“Running track, it definitely helps,” Tucker said when asked about the mental correlation between track and football.

Tucker’s newly gained speed stemmed from track workouts with Harper. Ahead of his sophomore year, it helped smooth over the transition from defensive back — the position that Calvert Hall originally recruited him to play — to running back, his father said.

Tucker made the change because there wasn’t an opportunity to be a starting defensive back as a sophomore on varsity. Then-Calvert Hall head coach Donald Davis took one week of practice to evaluate Tucker exclusively at running back. He showed patience during those practices, something many speedy running backs lack. Wade said Tucker kept questioning why he had to play running back.

But three games into the year, against Wise High School — one of the top public schools in the nation — Tucker appeared as the third or fourth-string running back and “balled out on them,” Steve said. One of his first drives included an 89-yard touchdown run, and he finished with 147 yards in Calvert Hall’s upset win. Doubts about which position best suited him were gone.

“I remember thinking, ‘Of course you should be a running back, have you seen how fast you are?’” Lewis said. “After that week, everyone knew what I knew, and he was our star running back.”

Tucker’s standout performance at running back overshadowed Steve’s original plan for a positional shift that was only supposed to be for 10th grade. Tucker had been running the ball since he started playing football at 6 years old. Speed, or what Wade referred to as Tucker’s “God-given attribute,” made the transition from playing running back in middle school to high school a straightforward one.

“It’s like that home-run speed,” Wade said. “Once the O-line creates a hole, he’s just speed. He just gets to the hole, and once he makes one man miss, I feel sorry for the defenders because it’s going to be hard to go get him.”

By the time Tucker became an upperclassman, defenses set up cover-4 on running plays just to have bodies that could track him down and tackle him. When they blitzed, he’d make a man miss. “He’s fast, but they didn’t know he was that fast,” Wade said with a laugh. “He’d sprint a little bit, and you would just hear him giggle as he ran past everyone else and scored.”

Tucker’s speed has allowed him to compensate for the shortcomings of Syracuse’s offensive line, which ranked 113th of 127 Football Bowl Subdivision teams in 2020, according to Pro Football Focus. That’s nothing new for Tucker, his father said — for much of high school, his offensive line had some success but wasn’t the most talented unit. He played with a Le’Veon Bell-esque running style in 11th grade because the best offensive line he had was able to open up holes more progressively. But high school prepared him and tempered his expectations. Syracuse’s challenges last year, particularly with the line, didn’t faze him, Steve said.

“The upside for a guy of Sean’s caliber and speed: if you can hold a block for one-Mississippi, he has enough speed that he will make a difference,” Wade said. “And we’ve seen that.”

As Syracuse’s definitive No. 1 back this season, Tucker hasn’t had to make much of an adjustment compared to when he emerged atop the depth chart last September due to COVID-19 opt outs. He’s already a “machine” when it comes to workload, said Davis, and the track workouts help keep him in shape year round. Typically during the offseason, he runs sprints, gassers — two down-backs from sideline to sideline — and hills at an Owings Mills track. This year, he was only home for a short period of time but didn’t take a significant break, Harper said. Instead, he “self-initiated” track workouts that were as intense as ones Harper would’ve done with him.

“He put himself in a good headspace mentally (and) put himself in a good space physically to … (get) in great shape and maintain it,” Harper said.

Tucker’s postgame tweets — where he recaps his statline alongside a photo from the most recent game — have become an SU fan-favorite. They’re just another platform for him to share information about himself, he said.

The start of Tucker’s timeline, which dates back to his freshman year in 2017, features postgame tweets with highlights videos from Calvert Hall’s games. But interspersed between those, depending on the season, are tweets about track meets.

First place and a personal record on Dec. 23, 2017 in the 55-meter. First place in the MIAA Championship for the 100-meter on May 14, 2018. The track tweets end on April 14, 2020 with a reference to Tucker’s All-Metro selection by the Baltimore Sun. But soon, with Tucker at Syracuse, they might return.

Published on September 22, 2021 at 11:38 pm

Contact Roshan: rferna04@syr.edu | @Roshan_f16