There were a lot of reasons for the players to be tight at the tryouts for the Philadelphia Soul -- a franchise entering its second year in the Arena Football League.
The least of them was the 8 a.m. starting time.
The open tryout for skill-position players was held early last Sunday morning at Temple University. Quarterbacks, running backs, receivers and kickers were all trying to show that they were worthy of a spot on the 39-man roster.
Where then do the nerves come in?
There are already 34 players under contract.
Last season, out of the 800 players who attended the open tryouts, 11 were invited to training camp and only three made the squad.
Talk about hard to impress.
This year, each of the 150 men out on that practice field hopes to be the one.
And believe me, there may only be one. And that would be just fine with Soul head coach Michael Trigg.
"If we only find one guy, it's worth it," Trigg said.
Maybe the one will be someone with NFL camp experience or somebody who has traveled the country attending tryout after tryout.
Or maybe the one will be a local product looking for opportunity in his own neighborhood.
Wide receiver prospect Jujuan Whitsett, a 26-year-old graduate of Philadelphia's Northeast High School, hopes it's the latter.
Whitsett is not concerned about bigger players, players with NFL tryouts under their belts or players who have sent in game film packages to the coaching staff.
"I'm here just to worry about me," Whitsett said.
As difficult a job as the players had, the coaches may have been faced with a tougher one in evaluating talent for the indoor football game.
Arena football is played on a 50-yard field with eight men to a side. It's a fast-paced game with no punting and not many running plays.
But it's another facet of the indoor game that makes arena football talent so difficult to scout. In the AFL, players play offense and defense.
"The challenge that we have right now is that the player coming into high school is usually put on one side of the ball," Trigg said.
"Our tough thing that we use these evaluations for is to see if they have any kind of ability to play the other side."
The difficulty of the job makes it a year-round task.
Soul offensive coordinator and former Penn lineman John Zinser attended the Philadelphia Eagles training camp with a different focus from the average fan.
"Everybody else was looking at Terrell Owens and Donovan" McNabb, Zinser said. "We're looking at the threes and the fours on the depth chart, seeing who's going to be coming our way in the near future."
While the offensive and defensive hopefuls have a lot of adjustments from the outdoor game to the AFL, nobody has it worse than the kickers.
Compared to the 18 1/2-foot wide and 10-foot high NFL goal posts, Arena League kickers are aiming for a target half the width with a crossbar five feet higher.
While the other players were running 40-yard dashes and performing calisthenics, the kickers were on the next field over booting at human targets from 58 yards away to simulate the distance from one goal line to the opposite goal posts.
If any of these players is among the lucky few to make the squad, he will have the job of trying to improve on a division-worst 5-11 record the Soul compiled in its first season of existence.
The Soul, who will begin play following Super Bowl XXXIX, are not short on big names in the upper management.
Owned by rockers Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora, the Soul are led in the front office by President and former Eagles standout Ron Jaworski.
No wonder this team is hard to impress.
