How a year at community college helped Bears’ van den Berg reach the NFL

Aaron Terry left no stone unturned when he decided to reach out to a random X account toward the end of 2019.

Terry had just added the Atlanta area to his recruiting responsibilities at Iowa Western. He didn’t have many connections yet, so Terry reached out to a social media account that covered high school recruiting in Georgia to see if he’d missed any prospects.

The account’s user sent him video of Jordan van den Berg, a linebacker from a small private school in the Atlanta suburbs who didn’t have a Division I offer.

“I’m like, ‘holy cow, this kid has all the tools,’” Terry, Iowa Western’s defensive line coach/recruiting coordinator, said. “He played middle linebacker and he was sideline-to-sideline, just ran around, hitting people, physical. Then he was playing (offensive) line and he was blocking dudes 30, 40 yards downfield. So I’m like, this kid, 6-foot-4, can run, is physical. I mean, those are the attributes I kind of look for when looking at (defensive) lineman.”

Bears coaches and scouting personnel had the same reaction when they saw van den Berg’s tape nearly seven years later, some pounding the table for him weeks ahead of the NFL draft.

When Bears general manager Ryan Poles felt van den Berg wouldn’t drop to them in the seventh round, he traded the team’s two seventh-round picks to select him in the sixth round.

“That’s a cool story,” Poles said of van den Berg after the draft. “I think the kid’s had a chip on his shoulder everywhere he’s been. He’s had to earn everything he’s had.”

Now van den Berg will try to provide a boost for a Bears defensive tackle room that needs it after an inconsistent season last year. How much of an impact he can make will be better known over the coming months. But van den Berg has a chance to prove himself after being overlooked throughout his football career.

It’s a story that almost didn’t happen had it not been for van den Berg’s time at a community college in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

‘That’s just him’

Toward the end of his senior season at Providence Christian Academy in Lilburn, Ga., van den Berg approached his head coach, Parker Conley, and defensive coordinator Ken Aldridge with a promise.

Van den Berg had earned offers to play at a Division II or III school. But van den Berg told his coaches that somehow he’d find a way to play at the D-I level.

“We were both like, OK,’” Aldridge said. “I mean, I never doubted his work ethic. But I’m thinking, OK, college coaches aren’t seeing that. So maybe they know more than we do.”

It seemed like a long shot given van den Berg’s short history with the sport.

Van den Berg hadn’t grown up around football like other prospects. He and his family moved to the United States from South Africa when he was 10 years old. His only understanding of the sport up to that point was from the movie “Invincible.”

But he had genetics that helped him catch up. His grandfather was a five-time Mr. South Africa bodybuilder while his grandmother held multiple South African swimming records.

Van den Berg paired that with a high motor that few players or coaches could slow down. His teammates respected but were scared of van den Berg at the same time. During certain drills, they counted what spot he was in the line opposite of theirs to avoid going against him.

“Normally you have to kick him in the rear end to get him going,” Aldridge said. “But with Jordan, you had to kind of reel him in because he went so hard all the time that sometimes it was a detriment to his body how hard he went. But that’s just him.”

Van den Berg started his football career at wide receiver and defensive end as a sophomore before moving to linebacker and the offensive line the next year as he physically grew. Despite his lack of football knowledge, van den Berg acted on his instincts from his rugby days and swarmed to the ball. Van den Berg then learned to anticipate things and recognized formations by watching hours of film.

The results followed. He was named first-team all-State as a senior and a two time all-Region and all-County honoree. Van den Berg became the school’s all-time leader in career tackles, single-season tackles and single-season tackles for loss and set school records with 157 tackles and 14 tackles for loss as a senior.

“Very surprised,” Aldridge said on how quickly van den Berg grasped football. “But again, he just worked so hard and he wanted to be good. He was always talking to you about what he could do, how he could get better. So from that aspect, it wasn’t as surprising. But coming from where he was with the limited background, yes, it was.”

Despite the results on the field, Conley couldn’t get teams to look at van den Berg. Conley suspected colleges looked past Providence Christian partly because of its small size and newer program.

So when Terry reached out to see van den Berg, Conley felt Iowa Western offered a the opportunity van den Berg searched for, even as a walk-on. Conley had himself walked on at Florida State and warned van den Berg of the risks and how difficult it could be.

But van dan Berg jumped at the opportunity to prove himself at Iowa Western at the end of his senior year.

“He knew he just wanted to play football and I think he knew in the back of his mind that he was as good as he as he thought he was,” Conley said. “And so when he took that step to go to (junior college), it’s because he recognized that the long-term goal for him was more important than the short term status of whatever school he went to.”

An unexpected development

When van den Berg arrived in Council Bluffs the summer of 2020, he planned to do whatever it took to advance his football career. He moved to a town of just over 62,000 residents on the Iowa-Nebraska border he had never visited before determined to realize his dream of playing in the NFL.

“I just wanted an opportunity,” van den Berg said. “I wanted an opportunity to prove myself.”

Terry appreciated van den Berg’s open-minded approach. But he already had a plan for his diamond in the rough.

Iowa Western had a history of winning games and developing linemen who’d move on to Power Four programs and eventually to the NFL. Terry moved van den Berg to the defensive line where he’d start at the end spot. Eventually, Iowa Western wanted to slide him over to tackle after he gained enough weight.

“To take a (middle) linebacker and then to say, ‘OK, we’re going to move them to defensive end, he’s gradually going to be defensive tackle,’ could be three years,” Iowa Western head coach Scott Strohmeier said. “So sometimes schools will just shy away from that, because I can find a guy who’s 250 pounds, played defensive end his whole life and gradually move him inside. But to go from a linebacker to a defensive end to a defensive tackle, sometimes it just takes too much time.”

There was a hitch to the plan.

Iowa Western wasn’t sure it’d have a fall season because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eventually its conference moved the season to the spring of 2021.

So just as the world adjusted, van den Berg and Iowa Western pivoted as well. They used the unexpected opportunity in the fall to build van den Berg from the ground up. Van den Berg ate so much food, including a gallon of milk and jar of peanut butter a day, and studied the entire fall to get bigger, stronger and smarter.

By the spring, van den Berg had gotten his weight up to roughly 280 pounds. He had joined Iowa Western at 225.

“He was school, football, weights,” Strohmeier said. “That’s it. That’s it. He’s not running around, he’s not doing other things like that. Those are the three things, that’s all.”

The delay also gave Iowa Western extra time to develop van den Berg during its group fall practices.

Van den Berg essentially started from scratch on the defensive line. He didn’t have bad habits that coaches had to fix. Instead, Terry believed van den Berg’s instincts and speed he showed as a linebacker would translate to his reaction on the defensive line. That became more evident toward the end of the fall.

“The effort was always there, where he would just go fast and hard and get to the ball, where early on, you can see, like, hey, this kid’s gonna make an impact, regardless of if he picks the fundamental piece up or not,” Terry said. “But as he got more (repetitions), he continued to work on the things he needed to improve on from a football standpoint. Then obviously off the field, he was physically getting bigger and stronger. So those two pieces together, you could see that he was developing at a fast pace.”

A pleasant surprise

At the start of the spring, van den Berg had won over Terry and the defensive coaching staff.

Van den Berg was far from a finished product. But the athleticism he played with throughout the spring allowed Iowa Western coaches to feel confident he’d do something special in the spring

“It was just like kind of riding a bike where his second time going through it, it kind of sped the process up, especially when you get in the games, that’s just pretty much straight instincts by then,” Terry said. “So I think with him not having bad habits, we created some good habits early on.”

Van den Berg recorded a sack in his first game against Snow College and added a career-high two tackles for loss. He finished with seven tackles in a game against Iowa Central midway through the year.

An injury limited van den Berg to six games. But he finished the year with 13 tackles including four for loss. He earned first team Junior College all-American and first team all-Regional honors.

Iowa Western coaches saw the same motor that Conley and Aldridge discovered in high school.

“You can’t teach someone to play like that all the time,” Strohmeier said. “You can teach them fundamentals. … But that’s just him. He’s gonna work tirelessly to be better at whatever he has to do.”

Colleges started to notice what they had missed the previous year. Big Ten schools like Penn State, Iowa and Nebraska showed interest.

When van den Berg went to Penn State for a workout, he put together what former Nittany Lions head coach James Franklin called the best workout he’d seen by a defensive lineman. Van den Berg eventually committed to Penn State.

“We obviously liked him coming here, but he exceeded, far exceeded [expectations],” Strohmeier said. “We brought him in as a walk-on and just gave him an opportunity. We have lots of guys that do that, and he won us all over, just with the type of kid he is and how hard he works. He was a pleasant, pleasant surprise.”

‘What we want’

Some time over the past few months, the Bears’ scouting staff brought over a video cutup to Bears defensive line coaches. It consisted of 60 plays from van den Berg during his college career.

The coaches then took the cutup to defensive coordinator Dennis Allen and told him he had to watch it.

“When you’re going through the draft process there’s a lot of what this guy can’t do,” Allen said. “Well, we tried to focus on what this guy can do. And when you watch that 60-play cutup of the things this player can do, it was pretty impressive. Just the movement skills, the power, the athleticism, the effort, the toughness. All those things, the football character — I keep saying that — bled off the tape to us. And he was a guy that we thought, man, this guy really fits into what we want to do.”

Van den Berg’s road up to that point had taken a couple turns since he left Western Iowa.

He spent three seasons with the Nittany Lions and appeared in 28 games, mostly in a reserve role. He transferred to Georgia Tech and proved he could be an NFL prospect over the past two years.

At Georgia Tech, he played 26 games and disrupted from the middle of the line with his power and quickness. He totaled four sacks, 67 tackles and 16 tackles for loss over two years. Van den Berg earned second team all-ACC honors in his first year and first team honors his second.

Strohmeier and Terry weren’t surprised to see van den Berg succeed once he got a chance at Georgia Tech. Once they truly had a chance to learn about van den Berg’s character, it was a matter of when, not if.

“It’s why we do what we do, right?” Strohmeier said. “You want to see your kids be successful and knowing all the intangible things that he brings, they’re all special. But he has a little bit even more of a special meaning and place in Iowa Western’s heart. He’s what we want.”

Van den Berg will now have to prove he’s what the Bears want. He’ll likely fight for a spot in the tackle rotation behind starters Grady Jarrett and Gervon Dexter. The Bears added depth to the room this offseason by signing Neville Gallimore, James Kentavius Street and James Lynch.

Van den Berg has been overlooked throughout his football journey. He’s ready to prove once again he can beat expectations.

“I definitely feel like my best football is yet to come,” van den Berg said. “You know that we got a great coaching staff, and I fully believe in them, and I’m gonna dive fully into it.”