Pros work with young football hopefuls

Local athletes - some hoping to make it big - were offered a rare opportunity Friday to practice under those who've already reached that level.

Behind Palatine's Village Hall sits Most Field, which was the site of a daylong football camp hosted by former Chicago Bear Bobby Douglass and current Baltimore Raven Tommy Zbikowski, a Buffalo Grove native. Seven other current NFL players, who either played with Zbikowski at the University of Notre Dame or now play with him in Baltimore, helped run drills and practice sessions.

About 110 football players attended from local high schools including Palatine, Fremd, St. Viator, Prospect, Buffalo Grove, Lake Zurich, Notre Dame and Niles North. Almost 50 area youth in third through eighth grade also took part, capping off their 4-day football camp held during the week.

"I want to get as far as I can and learning from the pros is the best opportunity I can get," said Justin Wallace, a junior running back and linebacker at Fremd.

Zbikowski, who lives in Palatine in the off-season, wanted to host a football camp for local high school players because he remembers having to travel farther distances for camps when he was a player at Buffalo Grove. He hopes to make his camp for higher schoolers an annual event.

"It's not that they don't know as much as us," Zbikowski said. "It's just that we've been around a lot of coaches with (different football) philosophies."

Indeed, some high school coaches came to watch their players practice with the pros on Friday. And Douglass, who partnered with Zbikowski for the Palatine camps this week, uses high school coaches to help run his grade school camps, which he's been hosting on and off for a number of years.

He sees his programs as being both physically and psychologically healthy for kids. They learn the concept of "team," with a few football fundamentals, Douglass said.

Douglass, the Bears quarterback between 1969 and 1975, puts those fundamentals into action on the practice field.

"Hey quarterback, you had another guy down the seam," he told a young player throwing to a covered receiver, ignoring one that was open. "Don't get locked into somebody."

Zbikowski, who was drafted by the Ravens last year, does most of his off-season training at the Golds Gym in Palatine. There he also runs Tommy Z's Pure Speed Sports Clinic, a running-centered sports training center for athletes of all ages.

During the camp's lunch break, Zbikowski noticed some players tossing around a football. He said that while pros can complain a lot of times, youths who came to his camp enjoy the sport for its own sake.

"All they're doing is playing football," Zbikowski said. "They live for it."