More Day 3: What stood out ($)
Sometimes, Richie Worship wishes he could jump in.
Chris Barclay feels the same way.
With Purdue having only two healthy scholarship running backs this spring — D.J. Knox and Markell Jones — and a walk-on, position coach Barclay has had to be creative and manage the group through the first week.
No wonder he'd like Worship, who appeared to be breaking through for the Boilermakers in the middle of last season, to step into drills. But Worship isn't quite ready: He's not even four months removed from surgery to repair a torn ACL that he suffered on a “freak” play in practice last fall.
But, man, he'd love to be.
“This whole process with my knee made me realize how much the little things really matter, so I’ll never take for granted ever again and I’m going to come back and be the workhorse I know I will be,” Worship said Thursday, speaking to reporters for the first time since the injury.
Worship said he’s about “halfway through” the recovery process, and he’s working on strengthening both his surgerically repaired knee but also the one that was the graft knee. He’s been able to continue upper-body lifting to try to stay in condition, but his entire attitude even about training has changed through the process as he’s experienced new feelings for the first time.
Worship said he’d never had a significant injury before, so when it happened, he was “clueless” what to even think, let alone do. He was able to lean on teammates who’d experienced it before, including position mate Knox, and he gradually overcame the mental hurdles and started to attack the physical ones.
There’s one of the latter coming soon, he hopes, that he can’t wait to tackle.
He said he’d even give anything just to run right now.
And for a guy who’s always been a bigger back and not that into conditioning, he joked, he’s “so thirsty to run now, it’s not even funny.”
“If I could run right now, I’d get out and run miles. I feel like Forrest Gump,” he said.
For now, Worship has to be content with the kind of running that can be done in a pool, but all the while, he’s targeting not just a return to the field by fall camp but an impressive one.
“I want to say a better back than where I left off. I want to be more of a complete back. I want to have that role I was known for before I (got hurt), but I want to put an exclamation point on it when I get back,” he said.
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