Mike Hood slaps the snooze button, and the inner voices start their debate.

Go back to sleep, one voice tells him. You're a teen-ager on summer break. Why rise early to sweat the day away on a football field -- on a sun-broiled steppe of dust and grit, really -- when you can sleep late and then hit the pool?

Sounds good. But another voice has the final say: "You just can't do that."

"I made the commitment," says Mike, a 14-year-old sophomore on the junior varsity football team at Baltimore County's Hereford High School. "If I didn't come out here, I'd be letting my teammates down, letting my coaches down and letting myself down."

Mike is taking part in "two-a-day" summer football practice, the junior boot camp that is many a high school boy's first and toughest taste of adversity. It is a rite of August, arriving annually with the certainty of backyard tomatoes and back-to-school sales.

The alarm is, for many youngsters, a watershed moment. They are children, on their way to becoming young men.

Every year, some boys will listen to the voice that tells them to ignore the clock, to quit. But more will find the courage to keep going -- and learn a lasting lesson in stick-to-it-ness.

"This is one of the toughest things they'll do in their life," says Augie Waibel, a former coach who became something of a legend during his three decades leading highly ranked football teams at Baltimore's Polytechnic Institute. "I had kids who went to Vietnam and said they survived Vietnam because of double-session football. The only difference was, in Vietnam they were shooting at them."

A stretch, comparing football practice to war. But the old coach makes his point: Summer football can help prepare a boy for even greater physical and mental rigors.

How tough are these practice sessions? John Walter, an assistant coach at Hereford High, puts it this way: From the first seven-hour day, many youngsters wish they were somewhere else.

"You know what they're all thinking," Walter says. "They want to be home playing that PlayStation."

Every day for a week, Mike comes back for more. After one morning session, he breaks for a lunch of two granola bars and lots of water. He's achy, and he's tired. He's soaked with perspiration.

And the day's second practice starts in less than an hour -- in full pads, under the midday sun.

Mother impressed

That afternoon, his mother, Debbie Hood, drives to the Hereford practice field, bringing her son a cold bottle of Gatorade. She's amazed by what she sees.

"I could not endure this," she says. "I could not stand the heat."

But she's underselling her own history of taking chances and facing physical challenges -- dragging heavy hoses and heaving ladders onto roofs while training to become a volunteer firefighter, for instance. Her experience helps her to realize that two-a-day football practice sessions are, for her son, a valuable exercise.

"Sometimes you have to take a little risk. He's stiff, he's sore, but that doesn't hold him back," she says. "That shows me something about Michael."

Dust in their teeth

It's barely 8 a.m. on a muggy morning when Mike is dropped off at Hereford High School. His red Igloo, a quart-size water jug, dangles from a cord. The freckle-faced redhead joins his jayvee teammates in the locker room to suit up for their 9 a.m. practice. He's got a jammed finger, and his back and one knee are sore.

The varsity team is already on the field, loosening up for the hour-long "conditioning" session that will precede that squad's two, two-hour practices.

"Three yards and a cloud of dust" is an old football saying about a grind-'em-out style of play. On the Hereford practice field, nearly every movement stirs dirt into the air. As the players stretch their legs by walking an exaggerated goose step -- they call them "Frankensteins" -- billowing dirt shrouds them. When they run the first of many wind sprints, same thing.

Players complain that the dust gets up their noses, into their sinuses, makes them miserable. "You can feel it in your teeth," says Travis Upton, a sophomore on the jayvee team.

Pros recall the agony

The drought has left the practice field at Hereford even more desert-like than usual. Many players wear sneakers; the ground is too hard for cleats.

Then again, this isn't the National Football League. Many high school teams' practice fields aren't well-groomed.

"We practiced on a field where there was gravel and all kinds of sticker bushes," says Priest Holmes, a running back for the Baltimore Ravens who grew up in Texas.

Even pros recall high school football camp with something approaching a shudder.

"Two-a-days back then were the worst thing I ever went through," says Brandon Stokley, a Ravens rookie who grew up in Louisiana. "It was just hot and tiring."

Tiring, to say the least. As the Hereford varsity wraps up its early-morning conditioning session with another round of wind sprints, some players are bent over, gasping. They will return in pads for two full practices.

Two-a-days, more than one player and coach asks. We do three-a-days here.

The grind has, within a week, prompted one jayvee player and three varsity players to quit. Among those is a starting linebacker for the varsity -- which seems to mystify head coach Steve Turnbaugh. After all, Hereford, two years removed from an undefeated, state championship season and augmented with players from last year's unbeaten jayvee team, expects a big year.

Turnbaugh tells his players they must accept the setback and move on.

"I tell the kids, 'If you don't have the discipline, dedication and desire to be a Hereford football player, we're probably better off without each other.' "

'Sense of belonging'

Many players remain eager to be part of this good thing.

"You get a sense of belonging," says Nick Shumaker, a junior wide receiver and defensive back. "It's like a big dysfunctional family -- a lot of abuse. But you come out of it with more friends than you came in with."

Others look ahead to the spectacle of the games. And sophomore Mike Higinbotham notes another motivation to survive the two-a-days: "The girls -- they love football players."

Like everyone at the camp, Mike Hood says that you've got to love to play football to put up with the grueling routine. In recreation leagues he played the glamour position, quarterback, but now he works out with the grunts on the line.

He knows it's unlikely he'll ever play professional or even college football. Still, he returns day after day, even as the grind takes a toll on his muscle and mind.

Carrying 15-pound load

As practice starts, the air is hot and still. If heat had a sound, it might be the whir of the late summer cicadas in the nearby woods. The players enter this outdoor steam bath wearing 15 pounds of pads. Their helmets block most breezes from cooling their heads.

It is the equipment that sets football practice apart, coaches say. Sure, the soccer, field hockey and volleyball teams are enduring the heat. But, as Waibel says, "Put all that stuff on and jog a lap around those two fields. Then I believe you'll begin to understand."

There also is the strain of physical contact.

In one drill, two players lie helmet-to-helmet, almost touching, one holding a ball. On command, they leap up, and the ball carrier tries to run over the tackler. The collisions are almost always violent. Some call this drill the "meat grinder."

In this drill, like most others, Mike struggles to hold his own against bigger, stronger players. He stands 5 feet 4 inches tall, weighs 160 pounds, yet he practices with the linemen.

As he scrimmages, one player on the sideline mutters to another, "Hood's too short."

Mike is used to this. "They tease me all the time about being small. It's OK," he says. Trying to look larger, he wears padding known as a "horse collar" around the back of his head. But most people think it just makes him look as if he has no neck.

Relying on brains, grit

Still, Mike has his moments. During one drill, he and another player combine to flatten a teammate.

"We had that happen to us a lot last year, so it felt good to reverse the role," he says.

Last year, Mike was lucky to get into games for short stretches of the fourth quarter. This year, he has set a goal: He wants to be the starting center. An honor student, he hopes to make up for his lack of size with his smarts and his drive.

Between practices, his coaches say he has a shot. But they won't decide until after tomorrow, the team's first scrimmage with another school. Mike, they say, stands out because of his determination.

"He's never going to accept the fact that he can't do something," says Gary Hesselbein, head jayvee coach. "He got killed sometimes last year. He would always jump up, bloody, and say, 'I'm not hurt.' "

Fathers reminisce

On a day when temperatures in the region rise into the mid-90s, Mike's father, also named Mike, takes a seat in the shade of an oak tree. He and the other fathers reminisce about their summer football experiences in high school.

The elder Hood says that when he played at Baltimore's Archbishop Curley High School in the early 1970s, he and his teammates came up with an answer to coaches who were stingy with water breaks.

"We all started slicing lemons and putting them in Baggies in our helmets," he says. "When the coach wasn't looking, we'd take them out and suck on them, just to get the saliva going."

He looks down at the practice field and says he approves of the lessons in perseverance and teamwork that football brings.

The physical grind?

"These kids are in their prime," he says. "There's no reason they can't do this."

At the right age

Children any younger would not benefit, either physically or mentally, from the drill-instructor approach to football coaching, says Sally A. White, a Towson University kinesiology professor and charter member of the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sports Psychology.

But, she says, high school students are at the right age for the stresses of summer football, so long as coaches take precautions against dehydration and heat-related maladies.

"If it's demanding and challenging, if the athlete can see self-improvement, see themselves getting better, then everybody's going to put up with being a little bit uncomfortable," she says.

"How do you develop mental toughness? Not by doing things we can do very well. Fundamentally, human beings like to be challenged. Sometimes we make things too easy."

Learning not to quit

Pete Skeels, an assistant jayvee coach at Hereford, offered this reason for youngsters to ride out the strains of summer football: "Once you start quitting, it gets easier to quit the next time."

For some at Hereford, the decision was made for them. For the first time in years, Hesselbein, the head jayvee coach, had to cut a few players. He says that when he cuts players from his baseball team, they often get teary and plead for reconsideration.

Not so with the football players.

"There's a sense of relief," he says.

'You've taken that step'

On a Friday afternoon, Mike and his teammates run up and down a steep hill, then they do it again and again. "Hills" are among the toughest conditioning drills, but Mike and his friends push themselves, knowing that this marks the end of a chapter.

For the jayvee team, this is the last double session.

Congratulate yourselves, Hesselbein tells his players.

"This is the end of a long week. No week is longer than this," he says. "You've taken that step."

Mike peels off his shoulder pads. His father, who is in business installing vinyl car roofs and automobile carpeting, is there to pick him up.

He sees a change in his son, a boy who last year gave up too easily when working around the shop.

"I've got to stick it out at work. He's got to stick it out here," he said.

The son says he's learning a lesson that he'll carry to the workplace, where, he realizes, "You have to come in whether you're tired or sick or stayed out too late."

He's asked how he'll mark the end of two-a-days.

"I'll celebrate," he says, "by sleeping in tomorrow."

Pub Date: 8/26/99