Giants’ Wayne Gallman getting grip on playbook through repetition
Running back Wayne Gallman, speaking during rookie minicamp at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center on Friday, May 12, 2017, said he plans to do plenty of studying the next six weeks to prepare for Giants training camp July 28. He's already got a notebook full of notes. Credit: James Escher
Wayne Gallman won’t be getting a chance to run through plays in practice with the Giants the next six weeks, but the rookie running back will be taking different types of reps during the break before training camp.
He’ll be going through his notebook, where he has jotted down just about everything anyone has told him since he arrived at the team’s facility more than a month ago.
“My notebook is so full,” he said with a chuckle this week at minicamp. “I have every spread, whatever I need, to look over things. All of the things that we’ve taken down, I’ve written them down repeatedly. When we talk about what we learned last week, I’m still writing it down because repetition for me is always the thing that keeps me ahead. The repetition of it puts it in my head and it sticks.”
Players don’t bring the tablets with the playbook on it home for their “vacation” (although Ben McAdoo said the team tries to make whatever learning tools a player needs available to them during the hiatus). That means most players have to rely on what they have written in their own personal notebooks for studying when away from the team.
That, Gallman said, has always been the way he has learned best. “I just write and write and write,” he said. “And if it’s the same thing on another day I’ll still write it because if I look back I’ll see it’s repeated and repeated. It must be important if I’m repeating it.”
The fourth-round pick from Clemson has already shown a willingness to be dedicated to his upcoming rookie season. Earlier this week, when his Clemson National Championship team was honored at the White House, Gallman chose to remain with the Giants even though they did not have any official practices that day. And on Tuesday, when the Giants took the field for the start of minicamp, Gallman went out early to catch passes off the machine. The only problem he encountered was that many of the receivers were already there, hogging the extra practice time.
The biggest obstacle for a rookie running back, though, is always the playbook. Gallman seems to be getting a grip on that.
“Man, I’ll tell you, that first week was probably the most stressfull,” he said. “But where I am now, I feel like I’m so much farther ahead. I’m really getting a good handle on the playbook . . . It’s a little bit easier [in college] because it’s not as much stuff. At all. It’s not nearly as much stuff as we have. But it’s pretty much the same emphasis. I started taking notes in college and it’s helping me out now.”
Those reps will come in handy for the next few weeks until training camp opens July 28. “Once I get it, I know it,” Gallman said. “But if I don’t know it, I’m going to do everything I can to know it.”
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
