BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH, N.C. NC State tailback Jamelle Eugene hates getting up early. Like most college students, he’d rather wake up around 10 a.m., slowly ease into the day and get the bulk of his work done in the afternoon and evening.
This summer, however, that’s just a dream for the junior from Naples, Fla. He’s much more interested in getting better as a football player and making his team better than he is sleeping in.
So five days a week, Eugene gets up at 5 a.m., goes to the Murphy Center for a four-hour weight-lifting and training session and then heads to Raleigh’s Ralph Campbell Community Center for his Sport Management internship. He serves as the summer program director for the center, organizing activities for dozens of young people.
Luckily for the kids, Eugene’s teammates are the ones who see him first thing in the morning.
“If I wake up before 10 a.m., I am not a good guy,” Eugene said. “The fact that I get up at 5, every day, is hard for me to believe. But it is what has to be done to get better.”
And, Eugene admits, the internship has been particularly useful for him.
“I have never been that good around kids,” he said. “It’s something I had to learn and this has taught me how to be a lot more patient.”
And patience is a virtue that has already paid off for Eugene during his Wolfpack football career.
Last year at this time, Eugene walked in to new head coach Tom O’Brien’s office to talk about transferring to a different school. Despite being the star of the 2007 spring game, Eugene felt like he was stuck behind juniors Toney Baker and Andre Brown, that he might not get the opportunity to contribute to the team as much as he would like.
“I just wanted to find a way to get on the field,” Eugene said. “I had to find a way to play, so, yeah, transferring was something I thought seriously about.”
O’Brien, in his first season with the Wolfpack after 10 years at Boston College, sympathized with Eugene, but he knew that Eugene, if patient, would eventually get his chance.
“I know it’s hard to be patient as a 19- or 20-year-old kid,” O’Brien said. “You just want to be on the football field. I understand that. But I also knew that we needed to have three tailbacks.”
By the third quarter of the season opener against Central Florida when Baker suffered a season-ending knee injury Eugene moved up the depth chart to second-team tailback. By the sixth game when Brown suffered a foot injury he stepped into the starting lineup logging more than twice as many rushing attempts in the Pack’s final six games as he did in the first six.
He finished the season as the team’s top rusher, gaining 667 yards on 172 attempts. He had three 100-yard rushing games, including a season-high 159 yards in the win over North Carolina.
And he earned a great deal of respect from O’Brien, who likes to call Eugene the “Energizer Bunny” for his relentless work ethic.
Eugene doesn’t mind being called that, but he prefers using the nickname his late aunt gave him on the day he was born.
“She told my mom, You look like you have been through a hurricane,’” Eugene said.
From that day on, to family and friends, he’s been called “Hurricane.”
At times last season, Eugene played that way. But he doesn’t give himself great grades for his performance while filling in for Baker and Brown for a team that was 11th in the ACC in rushing offense.
“I feel like last year I was a C+ for me,” Eugene said. “My team didn’t win. To be successful as a running back, your team has to win. We won a few games, four, then we fell off at the end. On the whole, we didn’t have a great season. I can’t separate my individual success from the team if we are not winning.”
Eugene heads into preseason practice as the team’s top tailback, with Baker and Brown behind him, giving the Wolfpack one of the league’s deepest running back corps. But the biggest question mark heading into the opening of preseason drills in 10 days is the offensive line, which is looking for two new starters.
“We have to be more consistent as an offense, period,” Eugene said. “It all starts up front. I can see their chemistry growing. I believe coming into camp they are going to be better than they were at the end of the season.”
With a little patience, Eugene expects they will be fine.
You can contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
