Feb. 24, 2014
By Matt Winkeljohn
The Good Word
It takes no time at all to see that Mr. Snoddy is anything but snobby, and perhaps just a few seconds more to wonder whether Georgia Tech’s intriguing two-sport athlete might be better still if he were a little more, uh, cocky.
Many Yellow Jackets fans know Broderick Snoddy as a running back on the football team, yet he’s achieved more in the first part of his three-year college career as a track student-athlete.
At least three times last winter/spring, after taking considerable time off from track after Carrollton High School and merging straight into the indoor season in the wake of Tech’s Sun Bowl win over USC, he set school records in the 60 meters with a best of 6.67 seconds.
That’s nuts, by the way.
Already this winter, he has set a personal record in the 200 meters – which he has rarely run indoors both because Carrollton nor Georgia Tech have indoor facilities – with a time a few weeks ago at Nashville of 21.23 seconds.
These are neat things, significant accomplishments, rare-air kind of deals.
Still, Mr. Snoddy is supremely humble.
He speaks so softly that a vacuum cleaner or other similarly annoying equipment in the background of the Edge Athletic Center makes hearing him difficult.
Snoddy doesn’t understand the fuss, why would someone think it a big deal that he has transitioned from one sport to another. Piece of cake.
“I would say . . . in track you have to you have to get your legs to turn over, and have choppy steps to get them going,” he said. “You sprint, too, in football, but . . . . [in football workouts] I pretty much do the same things, but in rack you don’t want to do as much upper body as you do your legs to get hamstrings strong.”
Snoddy does not exactly fit the bill for the Georgia Tech B-back, which has been his primary position, although that is not because of speed but size.
He’s thick, yet not like Jonathan Dwyer or Anthony Allen or Zach Laskey or David Sims. He’s not a keg; he’s a pony keg.
And he sure is quick.
Thing is, he might be faster still if he dropped a few pounds after football season to head into track. Snoddy, however, has opted against that. He wants to keep training at, or near, his football weight to remain familiar with the feeling.
“I try not to worry about my weight because I just want to maintain,” he said. “If I was lighter, I would probably be a lot faster, but being able to run with this weight is not too bad. Yeah, if I was a track-only athlete I would probably try to lose a few pounds.”
That idea has come up.
Snoddy is a junior in track, with the rest of this and his senior season remaining, and a redshirt sophomore as a football player yet to come. That means he can run track the rest of this spring and in the spring of 2015, and can play football this fall and in the fall of ’15.
Maybe, as a senior, if he decides to stop competing in track, the business major will shed pounds and see what happens. “I have give it some thought,” Snoddy said. “I really don’t know what I’m going to do right now.”
His scholarship comes from football so when the sports collide, he defers to the gridiron. That’ll be an issue soon with spring football practice.
In spring practice last season, Snoddy broke a hand early in the work and it hampered him throughout.
“I may run the home [track] meets [during spring football practice],” he said. “I prefer the outdoor 200 because indoors it’s less curves.
“It was hard. I finished out the spring, but not too hot because I broke my right hand and I’m right handed. I was trying to put my hand down, and . . . “
There are days when balancing two sports and class work can be beyond difficult. Snoddy, however, would not trade his spot.
He rushed for 150 yards last fall behind B-back Sims and Laskey, and hopes to forge a greater role this fall.
“It’s going pretty good,” he said. “It’s a lot of time management to have classes and to go from football workouts to track workouts . . . The coaches understand what’s going on. They give me a break sometimes when there is overlap.”
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