The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
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When a player suffers a season-ending injury, it's easy to slip outside the normal rigorous schedule of football life and feel isolated from the team. Especially in the early stages of an ACL injury, players aren't around practice, and Countess couldn't even attend games. But the Wolverines made sure to keep Countess involved, helping him make the transition from starting cornerback to a medical redshirt player going through rehabilitation. Fifth-year senior cornerback J.T. Floyd told him, "If you don't text me at halftime, you're going to hear from me, and you're not going to like what you hear." Although it's difficult to read defensive backfields and offensive route packages on the television version of a game, Countess would watch every play with rapt attention, looking for anything he could pick up that might help the team. "Anything I would see, I'd let him know. And he'd see the texts," Countess said. "The first month was the roughest. That was when the season was just starting, and the team was just molding. The first month, I relied on my coaches and peers to keep me in it, but after that I was fine." TheWolverine.com Podcast Click this icon to play or stop the podcast! Getting Back Into The Game Coaches constantly talk about the importance of experience. The only way to gain that invaluable asset is by playing — seeing situations unfold at the actual speed of Division I football and learning to adapt to them. Playing time is earned and skills are developed through countless repetitions in practice. When a player, like Countess, is forced to miss those reps, he must make them up in another way. "I had to become closer with film," Countess said. "I was always a guy that learned by doing. You get out there and try things differently. I had to learn how to take mental reps. I studied our defensive backs, and I studied opponents as well." Taking his cues from Floyd, who became so obsessive about the mental aspect of the game that he rigged up a way to watch game film on his computer while he was in the shower, Countess immersed himself in breaking down tendencies, routes, packages and defensive formations. If he couldn't help his team win on the field, he was going to do it any way he could. "If I saw something from one of our DBs, I'd ask him, 'Why are you doing that as opposed to this? What are you seeing out there?'" Countess said. "Just little things like that, and I think it's making us all better. We watch film together, and I'm going to share what I know and vice versa." Cornerback Raymon Taylor, who played sparingly as a true freshman