Every player who is invited to the NFL Combine is a great football player, but Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll revealed one thing that he looks for in players he talks to before selecting them in the draft: their experience playing sports other than football.
When asked about the importance of athletes playing multiple sports, Pete Carroll revealed that he loves asking about a player’s experience playing other sports.
“It’s one of the first things I’m interested in,” Carroll said, according to the Seattle Seahawks team website. “I want to hear the guy’s story, where he came from through his sports experience. And I’m just always asking those questions and digging into that.”
Carroll called this “crucially important” to his assessment of a player.
“I feel like it gives me an insight to the makeup and the background and the expanse of his experience and what that might bring to us,” Carroll said. “So it’s always been crucially important to me. I don’t hear other guys asking all those questions as much as I know I do. Maybe guys get worn out by it, but I want to know what position he played in Little League, and what happened, and how’s that go. What kind of a guard were you in when you’re playing hoops? Or were you a slasher or an assists guy. I want to know all that stuff. Did you play center field or not? I want to know those things, because they give me insights to guys. It’s one of the reasons that I despise the fact that guys don’t play multiple sports in high school. So many of our guys will say, ‘Hey, what’d you play?’ ‘I played basketball until ninth grade.'”
So if you’re a player looking to make the NFL, Carroll’s advice would be to spend time playing other sports, not just football.
