Arden Zwelling
CFL.ca
Some Canadian football players have to dedicate their entire lives to the sport.
They log countless hours in the gym, video room and, of course, on the field, dreaming of one day playing in the pros.
But not Saint Mary’s Huskies defensive end Chris Hodgson. Heck, the 26-year-old only decided he wanted to play football last year.
And look at him now. With just 10 games of competitive football under his belt, Hodgson is on his way to the CFL evaluation camp in Toronto where he will arrive as easily the most inexperienced player in attendance.
But while his football pedigree may not measure up with his competition at the E-Camp, his physical attributes are undeniable.
“I can tell you one thing for sure about Chris Hodgson. When they do the testing at the E-Camp, he’ll set the world ablaze,” Steve Sumarah, Hodgson’s coach at Saint Mary’s said. “I think his testing will really make people jump up and take notice of what he’s capable of doing.”
Hodgson was actually a semi-professional hockey journeyman for most of the past decade, bouncing from team-to-team throughout his roughshod career on skates.
That career began with playing for two teams over four years in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League from 2001-2005 before Hodgson moved to the East Coast Hockey League where he suited up for three different teams including the Phoenix Roadrunners when he played on a line with former NHL star Claude Lemieux.
In 2007, Hodgson ended up back in Canada where he spent his last three years on skates with the University of New Brunswick Varsity Reds, winning a national championship in 2009.
But it was obvious Hodgson didn’t have what it takes to play hockey at the highest level and with his dream of becoming a professional athlete fading away, he made a life-changing decision.
Acting purely on a whim, Hodgson packed the car and drove to La Belle Province for a football combine put on by the University of Montreal Carabins.
“The night before I just grabbed some equipment and drove to Montreal,” Hodgson said. “I was getting fed up with hockey. I just quit and said, ‘you know what, I’m going to try football.’ I’ve always wanted to play.”
Even more impressive, Hodgson had no idea what he was walking into at the combine in Montreal but still managed to put up better numbers than the majority of participants who had been playing football their entire lives.
The Fredericton, NB native was so unprepared he was looking up 40-yard dash techniques on YouTube the night before.
“I got some pretty good numbers at the combine and a couple teams were asking me ‘who are you? Where did you come from?’ And I was like, ‘I just quit hockey last week,” Hodgson said.
Yet for someone who got into football mid-way through his twenties because he always wanted to try it, Hodgson has already had near-unfathomable success — making his way to the cusp of playing the game professionally in less than a year.
It’s actually baffling that Hodgson even ended up on the CFL radar, seeing as he made the Huskies as a walk-on after transferring to Saint Mary’s during the summer of 2010 and didn’t even record a single tackle in his only regular season of football.
“The thing that every CFL scout has been intrigued with is his athleticism. His upside is through the roof,” Sumarah said. “He’s not the most experienced guy but he definitely brings some attributes to the table where you go ‘wow, this guy is impressive.’ ”
The transition from hockey to football certainly wasn’t easy for Hodgson, considering so much of the action on a hockey rink is made up spontaneously on the fly while much of football focuses on predetermined plays and endlessly rehearsed actions.
But Hodgson — who says he likes working out too much to keep going with hockey’s demanding schedule — loves the football lifestyle of routinely practicing, working out and, of course, eating.
Plus, much of the basic hockey skill set is transferrable to the gridiron. The three-step burst off the defensive line is the exact same concept as a three-step burst of acceleration on skates.
And that’s not to mention the six-foot-three, 260-pounder’s favourite transferable skill — hitting.
“I find a lot of the time in football when I’m coming around the edge to make a hit I can really get my shoulder down and level the guy. That came from hockey — it just kind of naturally transferred over,” Hodgson said.
On skates, Hodgson was one of the opponents hockey players fear when taking a pass up the middle of the ice or going into the corner to retrieve a loose puck. Let’s just say you always made sure you knew where he was on the ice.
He was never the most prolific scorer, netting 42 goals and 88 points in 225 games between the QMJHL and ECHL. It was when Hodgson didn’t have the puck on his stick that you had to pay the most attention to him.
“When I had the puck in hockey, I was just never too concerned with it. I just wanted to get rid of it and set someone up for a hit,” Hodgson admitted. “I would always just dump the puck in the zone and go after whoever went for it.”
Starting to get the sense of why Hodgson might be a bit more at home on a football field?
It’s why he was a natural fit for not only the defensive side of the ball but also special teams where he can use his lethal combination of size and speed to get downfield quickly and hunt down a kick returner.
“He just has so many things going for him on special teams — those were his biggest assets to us,” Sumarah said. “He’s a matchups nightmare. When you’re that big and strong, and you can run down the field that fast, someone has to block you and it’s going to be incredibly tough.”
Clearly, it will be his special teams prowess that ultimately defines Hodgson and allows him to stick in the CFL. With just one season of football on his resume, Hodgson has yet to pick up most of the intricacies of the defensive game.
But for his part, Hodgson is confident his raw athletic ability will carry him onto a CFL roster where he can learn the complexities of football from the tutelage of CFL coaches.
“I know that right away I’m about 20 years behind my competition in terms of learning the game. I’ve been looking up how to play certain defences on Google and stuff like that,” Hodgson said.
Luckily for Hodgson, who was practically bred to play a contact sport, the rest of the game comes incredibly naturally.
“I just like putting my head down and going for the quarterback,” Hodgson said. “You’re a football player. You hit your head off large men for three or four hours a day. That’s just what you do.”
