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On March 19th, the NIU Football Team began a long series of spring workouts to keep them conditioned before summer practices began. The last of the 15 total workouts concluded last Saturday on the 17th and head coach Thomas Hammock was proud to see where the team was by the end of it. He told NIU Athletics, "It’s exciting to see how the team has grown over the last three to four months... I’m excited to see where we can take this thing." As appreciation to the players who put their head down every day and got to work, the coaching staff gave out “Hard Hat” awards. The two players to receive these honors were freshman defensive tackle James Ester, and sophomore left tackle Marques Cox. I caught up with Marques recently to discuss several topics, including how he thought spring practice went, Marques told me, “We improved a lot from where we left off last season, Guys are getting bigger, faster, and stronger.” In the same article from NIU Athletics, coach Hammock had high remarks for the sophomore, saying, “Marques is playing at a high level, he’s probably our top offensive lineman right now.” Those are some powerful words for a player to receive from his head coach, with that said, Marques still wants to prove himself, “It’s always good to get that praise, but I know he expected me to do my job. He trusts me and I can’t break that trust.” From 2015-18, Max Scharping was the man that received the praise and paved the way for offensive success for the huskies. But before Scharping was selected 55th overall by the Houston Texans in the 2019 NFL Draft, he was able to lead the then freshman Marques through example, “He showed me what it looks like to be able to go to the next level.” Marques said, “Just the way he carried himself on and off the field. He was a great person to learn the game from.” After Scharping moved on, Marques took over as the starting left tackle in 2019 and never looked back since. I asked him to rate his performance so far as a huskie out of 10, “I’ll say 7. Because I know I’m capable of so much more.” Marques said. He felt that way because he wanted to improve in many ways, one emphasis for him was, “learning the game more and more. When you know your job, the game slows down. Just to be able to keep on learning the game has been my biggest improvement.” The recent pandemic made it tough on student-athletes like Marques to balance class and sports, he said, “online school was new for me. It was hard to get adjusted but when I did, it started to pick up… Finding creative ways to work out was fun though. It’s good that next season would kind of be back to normal.” Jumping into a new situation and finding success is hard, but whether that be as a division-1 left tackle or as an online university student, Marques is always quick to adjust and work to get better. For my final question, I wanted to know if there was possibly an NFL player or teammate that Marques used to help influence his dominant style today, he told me “Not really, I just get after people lol”
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