Viral Video Could be Key to Man's NFL Aspirations

More than a million people have seen Centreville resident and NFL hopeful Nick Schrank jump from a standing position onto a ball perched on a three-foot platform. He wowed William Shatner and Jay Leno performing the feat on the Tonight Show, and is a hit on YouTube, Yahoo, and NFL.com. But he hasn’t made a dime from his notoriety yet, and the jury is still out on whether his unorthodox approach to finding work as a professional football player will bear fruit.

“I think we’re pioneering a new way of how to expose yourself,” Schrank said, describing his efforts to land a job as a special teams player in the NFL or United Football League.  “In high school and in college, I wasn’t getting attention from scouts, and eventually I realized that if I wanted to get on their radar, I had to use unconventional means.”

After Schrank, 23,  had exhausted his savings traveling up and down the eastern seaboard attending open tryouts with UFL teams, he came up with the idea of performing a feat on video that would demonstrate what his admittedly thin football resume could not.

“I was between a rock and a hard place, the day before the video hit on Yahoo, I had literally zero money in my bank account, and I’d just had a deer hit my car,” he said.  “It’s one of those things where it’s always darkness before dawn.”

His first four attempts at jumping onto the perched ball were unsuccessful, but surprisingly, he didn’t hurt himself either. On the fourth try, he made it, and then recruited his brother, Steve, to film him performing the stunt.

“We tweeted the video to a Yahoo blogger in February and within 15 minutes it was up on their homepage,” Schrank recalled.  “It exploded on YouTube, and then Yahoo requested to put it in their own video archive, and it got like 777,000 views within a week.”

Shortly thereafter, the video went up on the NFL’s site, and a producer from the Tonight Show called to book him for the show. Schrank claims that he wasn’t nervous, because he embraces the concept of “fre flo do,” which teaches its adherents to embrace “letting go of fear.”

“I didn’t really notice the audience, it was just me, God, and Capell,” Shrank said, referring to his trainer. “It was live taping, so if I fell it would have been for the world to see.”

Schrank isn’t the first football player to try to use video of an impressive athletic feat to attract the attention of football scouts. In 2008, Jarron Gilbert, then a relatively obscure football player at San Jose State and now a member of the New York Jets, greatly improved his draft stock with a video of him jumping out of a pool.

But Schrank may have a harder time duplicating Gilbert’s success due to his more limited football resume. Schrank’s football experience is limited to one year on the varsity squad at Fauquier High School, two years of club football at George Mason University, and one summer of semi-pro ball for a team in Lynchburg called the Virginia Crimson Cardinals, in the North American Football League.

His early career was derailed by injuries—his eye “literally exploded” after it was hit with a paintball gun at age 13, and he suffered a torn ACL at GMU. After his sophomore year, he followed his then-girlfriend, and now wife, Susan Baird, to southwest Virginia. He hoped to catch on at Virginia Tech but was snubbed by the coaching staff.

“I put together a little notebook with all my football stats and as soon as I left the coach’s office, I could hear him throw it right in the garbage,” Schrank said.

He wound up at nearby Radford College, where he graduated last year with a degree in public relations and communications. Schrank hasn’t actually played football since appearing in an NAFL all-star game in October 2009, but still thinks he may be able to catch on as a special teams player on an NFL club. His immediate goal is to secure a job with the Hampton Roads-based Virginia Destroyers in the UFL. But Schrank, as a “social media guy,” isn’t trying to secure a spot via traditional means.

“They had open tryouts two and a half weeks ago, but they weren’t willing to give me a closed tryout, or waive the $60 registration fee to attend the tryout, so if they’re not willing to waive the fee that means they’re not going to give me a serious look,” Schrank said.

Schrank believes that the NFL lockout is making it harder to secure paid football jobs in any league, as NFL hopefuls drift over to other venues during the labor dispute.

“I might even bypass the UFL and go right to the NFL,” he said.  “I’m not going to say that’s true, because we’re in a lockout, but if there was no lockout, I would have gotten calls. When you get on The Tonight Show, something is going to happen.”

In the meantime, Schrank and his brother Steve work for their grandmother’s T-shirt company and have just launched their own clothing line, called Fresh Prince. Football analysts describe Schrank as a longshot to make the NFL, but he’s been listening to skeptics his whole life and not hearing a word they’ve said.

“Football is like an itch I’ve had to scratch since I was 7,” he said. “I think it’s my destiny to continuously fail but continue to move forward. I can be the guy who can take that beating, but keep going.”