Brian Poole Back in Practice Welcome News for the New York Jets
New York Jets cornerback Brian Poole is back on the practice field on Tuesday after a scary reaction to dehydration landed him in the hospital. Poole told reporters it is a pre-existing condition, and now that he’s over it, he’s ready to contribute.
“I'm feeling a lot better,” Poole said in a virtual press conference Tuesday. “I mean, it felt really good to get back on the grass, my teammates, kind of get back out there.”
Head coach Adam Gase said last week that it was serious enough that it caused them to be quite careful bringing Poole back. Poole did not hold back when discussing the severity.
“It was kind of scary,” he said. “I got like a preexisting condition, you know, that I kind of deal with. So, I mean kind of the beginning of camp’s always kind of tough for me. But I'm good at once I worked through it.”
Poole stated that he had some pretty bad cramps, something he dealt with during training camp last year. This season, he went to the hospital to deal with it. He stayed in the hospital for a couple of hours.
Now, the outlook is much better. Poole was on the practice field Tuesday for the first time since that first day. He went through individual drills first and the plan now is for him to get a few more days of that before he is up to full speed.
The health of players has been mostly focused on COVID-19, but this was an entirely different matter, that the Jets did not want to fool around with.
“It's been really tough,” Poole said. “I've been trying to get back on the field since the first day it happened, but you know, we've got really good trainers out there and, they've been kind of keeping me contained and getting me ready to go.”
Poole does not doubt that this ordeal will hamper him in the regular season. He also thinks the Jets secondary has adapted well to a post-Jamal Adams era.
“I thought we'd been preparing well,” Poole said. “That's what kind of goes into being ready. It's all of your preparation. I feel like we'd been preparing well. I feel like we got one of the best coaching staffs to get us prepared. I feel like we're going to be very prepared.”
Once he is back with the rest of the defense, Poole has one clear objective personally to make sure he contributes.
“I feel like I got to touch the ball more,” he explained. “Just create more turnovers and pretty much clean up everything in my game. I definitely want to touch the ball a lot more. You know what I mean? Just Polish up everything else.”
Poole seemed to believe this health scare was just something that he knows how to deal with. The Jets are happy there’s a player that’s coming back while so many others have been getting hurt.
