Getting Re-Charged
There's no such thing as off-season for San Diego Charger Jacques Cesaire

Ann Baldelli, The New London Day
July 31, 2005

Dana Jensen

Above, Jacques Cesaire, a defensive end for the San Diego Chargers, talks with his personal trainer Greg Drab of Advantage Personal Training while working out on the practice field.

Dana Jensen

Jacques Cesaire and his wife Jill Cesaire and their niece Nadia Helme (2yr) walk to the park to play. Nadia is the daughter of Jill's sister Ashley Murray and Seth Helme.

Dana Jensen

Jacques Cesaire runs through obstacles on the practice field at Fitch High School.

He's panting as he speaks.

Jacques Cesaire has just finished a nearly 90-minute workout in the noontime sun on a suffocatingly hot July day, and the 6-foot-2, 295-pound defensive end for the San Diego Chargers is laboring to catch his breath.

Four members of the Fitch High School football squad have been working out with Cesaire, and they've circled around him to hear what he has to say. The teenagers are winded too, and sweating just as profusely.

"The only person who can stop you is you," Cesaire begins. "I learned that at an early age. You can accomplish anything you want to as long as you put your mind to it. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it's not. If you set goals and work hard, you can realize your dreams."

Playing for the National Football League is no easy accomplishment, the 24-year-old tells the kids. There are about 5 million high school-aged football players in the country, compared to 1,200 players in the NFL, he says.

"The guys who make it are the ones who did what they had to do the whole way through," he says. "And all of them know that another 1,200 guys are in the next graduating class, trying to take their jobs away."

Cesaire, a native of Gardner, Mass., and a former student at Southern Connecticut State University, begins his third season with the Chargers this week, where he was the starting left defensive end for most of the 2004 season. Over the past winter and spring, and for the month of July, Cesaire has been working out in the Mystic-Groton area, where he lives off-season with his new bride, the former Jill Murray, a 1998 graduate of Robert E. Fitch Sr. High School.

The couple settled part time in Mystic a month before their wedding last February, after the Chargers won the AFC West championship, but lost their first playoff game to the New York Jets. When they arrived, Cesaire immediately began searching for a personal trainer to work with in the off-season. He liked the ad he saw in the Yellow Pages for Advantage Personal Training in Mystic. He called and left a message at the gym, saying he was a professional athlete who wanted to do one-on-one training.

"It's not a call that you get every day, that there is a professional football player living in Mystic, and that he doesn't have access to a car, but that he wants to do training, so I thought that maybe it was a friend playing a joke on me," says Greg Drab, the gym's owner and a personal trainer.

Later, he would realize that Cesaire didn't have a car because his permanent home is in San Diego, and he was only here for January and February, before reporting back to the Chargers' facility in March. Drab invited Cesaire to his gym for a talk and a tour, and the two immediately hit it off.

"Meeting Greg Drab was a blessing," Cesaire now says. In the winter of 2004, he had worked out with a trainer from New Haven, who helped him bulk up.

"The guy was a big body builder, and I put on mass, big guns, but none of that will help you with football," Cesaire says. He was so muscled, Cesaire says, that he had trouble moving. Drab had an alternate plan.

"He calls it functional strength, and it is moves that are important for football," Cesaire says. He points to a nearby 4-foot-tall chain link fence, saying he's able to scale that now without touching it.

To develop that strength, they'd meet in the Old Mystic gym or on the practice field at Fitch, doing traditional exercises and drills, and other activities that Drab thought would help Cesaire move faster and be more powerful.

"The goal is to improve his sports performance to get at the specific demands of the sport," says Drab. "For football, those are short, high-intensity spurts. You explode for eight to 10 seconds, then you rest, then you go out for another play. So you work the different energy systems that allow you to do that. In football, you want to train the anaerobic energy system."

Often that meant running drills on the field. Fitch football coach Jim Buonocore remembers the first time he saw Cesaire working out at the high school last spring.

"I was heading down to the football field with a phys ed class when I saw him working out, and I thought, 'Holy smokes, I hope this kid just transferred into Fitch.' Turns out, he's an NFL player."

The school has since rolled out the welcome mat, giving Drab and Cesaire a key to the football team's shed so they can haul out workout equipment whenever they need it.

"Here's an NFL guy who came out of a Division II school, and you don't see that too often, and he's right here working out on our school grounds and using our equipment. It's just terrific," Buonocore says.

Cesaire wasn't drafted. He was a free agent who got a call from the Chargers five minutes after the draft ended in 2003, he says. He made the team's active roster, not its practice squad, and started most of last year after a teammate was injured.

"When you come on as a free agent, it's extremely hard, because they automatically put you on the back burner," Cesaire says. "They're thinking, you're good enough to practice with us, but not to play with us, so you gotta play with a chip on your shoulder. Three years later, I really can't complain."

Drab says it's Cesaire's own hard work that has paid off. He's intensive about training. In the initial six weeks the two worked together, Cesaire gained weight but decreased his body fat from 20 percent to 18.5. When he started training, he had 228 pounds of lean body mass and 57 pounds of fat. By mid-March, although he had gained 12 pounds, he had lost 2 pounds of fat and added 14 pounds of muscle, for a total weight of 297 with 242 pounds of lean body mass.

That muscle has helped to propel him. Running drills with the Fitch football players, Cesaire is able to keep up with, or pass, the boys as they all sprint down the field. On the sidelines, Buonocore is screaming, "He's 295 pounds and he's beating you!" and the kids are running for their lives.

Doing the "Granny toss," Cesaire squats with a 10-pound medicine ball in his hands, then hoists it backwards, over his head, a distance of nearly 15 feet. He's pushes an oversized tire up a hill at the practice field, flipping it entirely, not end over end, like the teenagers do. When Cesaire moves the tire, it literally flips from side to side. Running around practice bags, his turns are so crisp that turf flies into the air as he swivels his hips.

"You've got to move your feet as fast as your hands," he tells the kids, as he runs the same drills that they're running. "And don't touch the bags. Turn your hips."

Buonocore stands by, seemingly mesmerized.

"Seeing him do these same drills, and the amount of intensity he displays, and he's not just doing them, he's doing them right and he's doing them 110 percent," the coach says. "It's amazing."

Later, when a bystander comments that Cesaire isn't as big as they'd expect an NFL lineman to be, Buonocore says, "The biggest guy doesn't always win, but the biggest, fastest and strongest does."

Cesaire, the second of five children born to immigrant Haitian parents, didn't always have a passion for football. He remembers his freshman year of high school, when he hid in his older brother's car when the brother went to pick up his football gear. "I told him. 'Don't tell the coach I'm out here,' and then, I hear a knock on the car window, and the coach is there saying, 'Get your butt in here, you're playing.' "

It had been the same when he played Pop Warner ball.

"When I first started, I was scared to death, but then something clicks in you, and you think, 'What is the worst thing that can happen to you?' Anyone who tells you they're not scared is lying. I mean, you're putting on equipment and running into other people, but then you realize, this is the same sport you played when you were a little kid."

Cesaire is cautious but empowered when he's on the football field now. Play every play, he tells the Fitch players, "... like it is the last play you will ever do in your life."

In April, with the blessing of the Chargers' strength coach, Drab spent a week in San Diego, observing team training sessions. Cesaire wanted to continue working with Drab, and Drab wanted to learn more so he could mimic here what the team does. "I called it Greg's Fantasy Camp, a week in a gym working with NFL players," Drab says.

Since reporting back to the Chargers' facility in March, Cesaire has flown back every fifth week to work out with Drab, and spent nearly all of July training with him.

At the Advantage gym, where he works out four to five times a week, he's earned the nickname, "Gentle Giant," and befriended some of the other clients there, like Marvin Jones, the New London High School freshman who is waging a public battle to lose weight and get healthy. Cesaire says he is inspired by young Jones, who hopes to play football at New London High this fall.

Cesaire is also motivated by his father, Carmy, and his mother, Jackie, who both work as nurses. His dream is to someday make enough money so that his mother can retire, no longer working the 16-hour days that she does now. His father, he says, is his biggest fan next to his wife, Jill, and watches all of his games on a 70-inch wide-screen television that is equipped with NFL Direct.

"My parents came to this country at a young age, and it was a big struggle," Cesaire says. "I look at my parents and their situation, and know they weren't given much chance, but they never made excuses, and they worked hard, they always have. What I learned is that if you work hard, you can get what you want."

Coming out of Southern, where he met Jill Murray, he believed he was good enough to play in the NFL, and welcomed the opportunity to go to San Diego. His senior year of high school, the Gardner team won the state championship, and Cesaire says it was the best time of his life. But he knew it would be nothing compared to playing in the NFL.

"At Southern, there were maybe 3,000 people watching a game, but then you're in Kansas City with maybe 80,000 people in the stands, and a lot of them want to kill you," he says. "And you're out there, playing against some of the best running backs in the NFL."

Jacques and Jill Cesaire hope to begin construction of a home of their own in the Mystic area sometime soon, but this week, Cesaire officially reported back to the Chargers' facility for the start of the 2005 season.

"I think we're going to surprise a lot of people this year," he says. "When I started, a lot of people here didn't know much about the Chargers. But last year we turned it around, and this year, we're committed to win and get better."

He knows he's done his part to stay in shape in the off-season, and to make Charger friends in Patriots' territory.

The Fitch players who worked out with Cesaire will be watching Chargers' games this fall, and so will the regulars at Advantage, and the Pizza Place on Long Hill Road in Groton, Cesaire's favorite local eatery.

"For me, I'm a huge football fan, and I'm still a Giants' fan," Drab says. "But in the NFL there are two conferences, and now the Chargers are my favorite AFC team. I'll be watching."