The Gators highest rated commitment this far into the recruiting process is Miami Central running back Dalvin Cook. Gator Country got in touch with Cook before he left his home in Miami and he agreed to do a journal with us to give you guys a behind the scenes look at what it’s really like to participate in The Opening.
Why you ask?
Because the chance that Nike is going to fly any of us across the country and give us a bunch of free stuff is pretty much zero.
So here, in his own words (as told to Nick de la Torre) is what the first two days have been like for Cook.
We had a flight from Miami. I flew in with Ermon Lane, Treon Harris and Joseph Yearby. The flight from Miami to Portland was all right, it was really long but I slept the whole way. After we landed in Portland, a van picked us up and brought us to the hotel. We got book bags with all of our Nike gear when we checked in at the hotel. It’s some amazing stuff, some new stuff that a lot of people don’t have.
We woke up this morning [Monday] and had breakfast around 7 a.m. and then went over to Nike headquarters for the SPARQ training. I feel like I did better than I thought I would. I ran the 40 a couple of times but I think I could have run better. [Cook ran an official 4.46 laser 40-yard dash].
After the SPARQ training we just went to have lunch and chilled in the game room and played NCAA 14, which hasn’t even been released yet. It’s really up to date, there’s a lot of stuff in the game. I played against the quarterback who is committed to UM [Brad Kaaya]. He took Miami and I played with Florida but we didn’t get to finish the game because we had to go watch the SPARQ finals.
For dinner we’re going to have an all-you-can-eat type thing and then we have meetings at 9:30 with our teams for the 7-on-7 tomorrow. I have Travis Rudolph, Chris Lammons, JoJo Robinson and Tony Brown on my team, so I think we’ll do pretty good. We started looking at the playbook a little bit but I think we’ll get into it more tonight [Monday night].