'Just Go Out There And Handle My Business' Travon Walker Locks In at Day 1 of Rookie Minicamp
All eyes were on No. 1 overall pick Travon Walker during the first day of the Jaguars rookie minicamp. His athleticism and versatility were on full display, flying around the field and making plays.
For Walker, the excitement to get out on the football field outweighed anything else. The pressure of being the number one overall pick could easily serve as a distraction, but that’s not something that fazes Walker.
“I definitely have to say, just me being the person I am, I just like to be where my feet are, control what I can control, do what I can do best to help contribute to the team,” Walker said. “I’m not really all looking into myself, like I know what I can do to help my teammates. But I’m really not trying to please anybody else other than my team and my coaches.”
Head Coach Doug Pederson has full confidence that Walker can continue to handle the pressure and has made it clear that he will help guide Walker through the process.
“I think he’ll handle it extremely well,” Pederson said. “That’s why we have [Director of Public Relations] Alex [Brooks] to coach him up. But quite honestly, it’s my job to protect him a little bit from some of the outside influences that could affect him and then just allow him to focus on his job. Travon is a mature individual. He’s young, but he’ll be well coached up and that’s our job to do that.”
Walker’s demeanor is what makes him an intriguing player. This calm and collected approach coupled with the unending thirst to become a better football player makes him the ideal teammate and one who is focused on personal and team improvement.
“For me, I’ve always been coached to just be a coachable player,” Walker said. “If you’re not coachable then you’re really not trying to help yourself improve and you’re not trying to help your team improve. So, for me, like I said, I’m big on team then I’ll correct myself with whatever the coaches need.”
This pennant for team success and personal improvement saw Walker line up at outside linebacker during today’s session under outside linebacker’s coach Bill Shuey. For Walker, it is a relatively new position that could maximize his athletic potential.
“I kind of always dibbled and dabbled in the outside linebacker world,” Walker said. “But just strictly working on outside linebacker things in practice I feel like I’m truly getting more comfortable with the position, learn a lot more techniques coming from that position and not have to learn so many different other positions.”
With day one of rookie minicamp in the books, Walker has shown that he is all business on the football field and is committed to tackling what he needs to learn coming to the NFL.
“There’s always room for improvement,” Walker said. “Coming from Georgia, there was a lot of techniques we went over but also coming here [there are a lot]. At Georgia we ran a lot of techniques, but once I got here, [I had to] break down a lot of those techniques that I learned at Georgia, just put them into a family and focus on that one thing.”
