Leonard Hankerson benifitted from workouts

It’s called the Hammer route and it’s one that provided Leonard Hankerson problems. At 6-foot-2, he’s a long strider; this route calls for quick breaks – and shorter strides.

“They’re trying to get you to push in at 5 yards and push up to 10 yards and then stick,” said the Redskins third-round pick. “I’m looking at my yardage and when I get there I feel I overrun it so it’s difficult for me to plant and go. I just have to keep working on it.”

The significance? Had Hankerson not attended the workouts, he would have struggled with this move in training camp. Now, he said, having been tutored on the route by Anthony Armstrong, he can work on it in Miami.

Perhaps the benefits of the players-only workouts are overblown. In some cases that’s probably true. But not in Hankerson’s case, even if this was a glorified passing camp. Considering he’s a receiver, and the Redskins need the young wideouts to help, this sort of setup was beneficial.

“In Miami you don’t have a quarterback like that to throw,” he said. “All I can do is run routes on air or do cone drills. But coming up here and working with the quarterback and running routes and getting that timing down, it’s a good situation. You need that. So when the season comes it’ll be on time when you get there.”

Hankerson received some of the playbook, a seven-day installment.

“But you need the coaches there to take you through everything,” he said. “Without that coach, it’s tough to look in the playbook by yourself and get it all down.”

A side benefit was getting to know some of the other players. Of course, when camp opens there will be approximately 50 or 60 players he hasn’t yet met. But meeting some of the veteran receivers, such as Armstrong, Brandon Banks and Malcolm Kelly, helped.

“They taught me this route and that route and how to run it and where to run it at,” Hankerson said. “The first time I didn’t know all that stuff. I had to learn it first-hand. [Now] the quarterback can call out a route and tell me to run this route and I can be the first one to run it.”


(washingtonexaminer.com)