[10/17/04]During the summer, John Burrell needs those extra hours that daylight savings time provides.

A day’s work during training camp sees him wake up at 5:30 a.m. and head into the office. Still bleary-eyed, he begins to weigh in the players, deal with their injuries, tape joints for practice and attend meetings. And that’s just in the morning.

The team then practices for the first of two-a-days between which Burrell treats dings and sores. His biggest challenge, of course, is keeping the players hydrated in the scorching heat.

After the second practice, he treats more injuries and meets with players and coaches. He finally arrives home from a long day and plops down on his couch at 10 p.m.

Just a typical day’s work for a head trainer in the NFL.

“It takes long days, long hours,” Burrell said of his job.

After years of working his way up through the ranks, Burrell, a graduate of Vicksburg High in 1984, was named the head trainer of the Washington Redskins this season.

Prior to this promotion, Burrell worked as an assistant trainer for the Jacksonville Jaguars since the organization’s inception in 1995.

When Joe Gibbs returned to the Redskins this season, he wanted Bubba Tyner a longtime Redskins trainer to work for him. But Tyner was retired and didn’t want to return. He did, however, recommend an up-and-coming trainer in Jacksonville.

Burrell met with Gibbs and team owner Daniel Snyder and was offered his dream job soon after.

“This is it,” Burrell said. “Once you become a head athletic trainer in the National Football League, I’m hoping I can stay here 30 years and retire. This is the last stop that you try to achieve.

“I would have never thought this in my wildest imagination, not at all.”

It wasn’t in his mind when he was a student trainer under coach Jim Sizemore at Vicksburg High in the early 1980s.

Current Vicksburg High coach Alonzo Stevens remembers teaching Burrell in high school and what a good student he was.

“He was a go-to guy,” Stevens said. “When you get those kind of guys in high school that are sharp, good students … he just took his work seriously.”

In fact, Stevens was so impressed with Burrell, he helped get him his first professional job as an athletic trainer.

Burrell attended Hinds Community College in Raymond after high school and then transferred to Southern Miss. While there, he honed his skills by working with both the football and basketball teams. He attended graduate school at Southeastern Louisiana for a year before meeting up with Stevens once again.

When Stevens was an assistant coach at Alcorn State, the team needed a new trainer. Stevens mentioned Burrell’s name as a candidate. Burrell interviewed and got the job, becoming the program’s first certified athletic trainer.

Burrell came in during a high point in Alcorn’s football history, working with famed quarterback Steve McNair, who he remains close friends with today.

“I always tell the story that I know two great ones coming up because I was at Southern with Brett Favre, too,” Burrell said with a laugh.

In only a short time, he brought sweeping changes to the training of athletes at Alcorn.

“In the past, they just used to treat you with ice,” said Vicksburg High assistant coach Toriano Wells, who played defensive back at Alcorn while Burrell was the trainer. “When John Burrell came, we had ice with electronic stimulation, whirlpool, massage therapy, ultrasound therapy. He brought us up. When he came, the athletic program went to another level.”

Burrell was a no-nonsense work-oholic. He would force players to show up two hours before practice for treatment, so they didn’t miss their reps on the field. He also worked very closely with the coaches and kept an updated list of injuries with how long each player should sit out.

Even those who had to miss practice were kept on some sort of exercise or training to stay in shape.

“He really knows the muscles, the body,” Stevens said. “He got the respect of the players because he’s not going to put a player out there hurt.”

Burrell’s biggest break in the business actually came while he was in college. While working as a trainer at Southern Miss, he applied for a summer internship with the Atlanta Falcons. Burrell was chosen from hundreds of applicants and gave up his two summer jobs in Vicksburg to pursue his dream.

“Working internships is a lot of hard hours and not a lot of pay,” he said. “I was doing good work with the Corps of Engineers and as a waiter at Tuminello’s, but I thought, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I got one shot to do it, so I better take it. And I did.”

Burrell interned with the Falcons for five summers, learning from the top minds in his field. After Alcorn, he took a trainer job for the Canadian Football League’s expansion team in Shreveport, La.

He was there only nine months before sending an application in 1995 to one of the NFL’s two expansion franchises, the Jacksonville Jaguars.

“I didn’t know anyone there,” Burrell said. “There were 500 applicants for two positions. They narrowed it from 500 to five and from five to two, and I was one of the two.”

He became a member of the Jags’ first training team and worked for the organization for nine years before leaving for the head trainer’s job in Washington this season.

Now he not only keeps the players healthy, he also has a say in who stays on the team.

“They emphasize so many things with different factors, and one of the last factors is the injury factor,” he said. “We provide the coaching staff with information. It’s critical because nine times out of 10 it comes down to who are we going to relieve and who are we going to keep? Are they healthy or not healthy? And how much money is it going to cost you?”

Despite the long, hard hours, Burrell is living his dream.

“Being a head athletic trainer in the NFL, each day is different,” Burrell said. “It’s very exciting, every day is a different story.”