1. Introduction
College athletics in America, which is administered by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), is a multi-billion-dollar industry, with football being the most dominant sport [
1]. The highest level of collegiate competition is Division I (followed by Divisions II and III), and there is great competition between schools with the recruitment of athletes to their respective programs. Recruiting the best players possible is incumbent on those who run athletic programs, and Division I and II schools can offer scholarships to entice athletes to their programs [
2]. High-quality recruits to a football program can have a major impact for a university, not only on the field [
3], but financially as well [
4]. Traditionally, most recruits to a football program will come from high schools. However, acquiring junior (or community) college transfers is another method by which players can be brought into a program [
5].
Junior college athletes will generally spend two years within a program at this level, before transferring to a four-year institution where they will have academic credit and the opportunity to participate in athletics. As high school football players will often need time to physically mature and develop before they are competitive with experienced collegiate players [
6,
7], the same could be expected of junior college players [
5]. Indeed, more experienced athletes within a collegiate program will be more physically developed when compared to their younger counterparts [
5,
8,
9]. This may mean that a player who is lacking certain qualities may not be able to physically compete against their opponents, or even their teammates during practice. For example, Carbuhn et al. [
5] found body mass discrepancies of approximately 6–8 kilograms (kg) between junior college transfers and established Division I quarterbacks (QB), running backs (RB), and defensive linemen. Junior college linemen who have transferred into a Division I program were found to be approximately 10 kg lighter than their established Division I counterparts, while linebackers (LB) were almost 20 kg lighter [
5]. A junior college transfer, who is notably lighter than the established players from the program, will have difficulty in competing during practice, which could then influence their ability to earn playing time.
A further issue is that there has been little research of the specific athletic population of junior college football players [
5,
10,
11], and some of the research that does exist is over 20 years old [
10,
11]. Additionally, there has been no direct documentation of many of the important physiological characteristics of junior college football players. Carbuhn et al. [
5] measured maximal strength of junior college transfers into a Division I program, including one-repetition maximum (1RM) bench press, squat and power clean, as well as the vertical jump (VJ). Across almost every position, Carbuhn et al. [
5] found that junior college transfers exhibited lower levels of strength, and power as defined by VJ height. However, Carbuhn et al. [
5] did not measure characteristics such as linear and change-of-direction (COD) speed, despite their importance to football [
12,
13,
14,
15]. It would be valuable to measure the performance of junior college football players in tests common to the sport—such as the 36.58 meter (m) (40 yard) sprint, pro-agility shuttle, and three cone-drill—which has not yet been documented in the scientific literature.
Dos Remedios and Holland [
11] conducted a survey of 35 junior college football programs, to compare the data to the Division I football players profiled by Berg et al. [
16]. The data indicated that junior college players were generally smaller in stature, weaker in maximum bench press and squat strength tests, and slower in the 36.58 m sprint. This is notable, given the importance of qualities such as body size, strength, power, and speed for football [
9,
12,
13,
15,
17,
18,
19]. It would be beneficial to collegiate strength and conditioning coaches to know the traits of junior college players before they enter higher-level college football competition. Additionally, there is also value in determining whether the positional characteristics of junior college players is similar to that established for high school [
6,
13,
20], collegiate [
16,
21,
22,
23,
24,
25], and professional [
12,
26,
27] players. Establishing a baseline of performance assessments for a sample of junior college players will provide useful information for football and strength and conditioning coaches, in that it will elicit greater understanding of the characteristics of players who may enter their program from this level of competition. Although coaches will always want to directly assess the athletic performance of potential junior college recruits to their program, access to data of a sample of equivalent players will provide context for any measurements that are collected.
Therefore, this study documented the characteristics of football players from a junior college that has regularly had players transfer to Division I programs. Although this sample draws from only one school, this research does provide a preliminary, detailed analysis of a specific sample of football players that has been under-investigated in the literature. The players were assessed in stature and body mass, jump performance, linear and COD speed, and strength endurance [
5,
6,
12,
13,
18,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24,
28]. The subjects were also split into skill (SK), big skill (BSK), and linemen (LM) groups to compare the physical and physiological traits across positions. A hypothesis was made that the SK and BSK groups would perform better in the performance tests, but the LM would be physically taller and heavier. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that when compared to data from Division I and II players, the junior college players would generally be smaller in stature, and perform poorer in the performance tests. As stated, determining a performance baseline for junior college football players will provide useful information for coaches as they will be more aware of the characteristics of players from this competition level. Furthermore, junior college players will also recognize those physiological characteristics they need to improve in order to be competitive at higher levels of play.
4. Discussion
This is the first study to provide a detailed profile of junior college American football players. Previous research has detailed the characteristics of Divisions I [
5,
16,
21,
22,
25], II [
21], and III [
23,
24] football players, such that certain results from this study can be contextualized. In addition to this, players were split into SK, BSK, and LM groups to ascertain whether junior college players exhibited the same characteristics as that established for football players in the literature. Although this study included data from players from only one school, this research still provides a preliminary analysis of a specific sample of junior college football players, who have been under-investigated in the literature. Furthermore, while it should be acknowledged that there are limitations as to the predictive capabilities of testing data [
26,
37], this data still provides an understanding of those characteristics that have been deemed important to this sport [
15]. Regarding the performance tests used in this study, it was hypothesized that the SK and BSK players would perform better when compared to LM. Generally, this hypothesis was confirmed. A further hypothesis was that higher-level players from Division I school would be physically bigger, and perform better in the football-specific tests. As will be discussed, to an extent this was confirmed as well.
Collegiate football players have generally increased in both height and body mass over the past few decades, and this has been especially pronounced for LM [
19]. The LM in this study were taller and heavier than both the BSK and SK groups, which was expected, while the BSK group was also heavier than the SK players (
Table 1). The nature of the position for LM dictates the need for greater body size, and these results are reflective of the literature [
12,
13,
15,
19,
20,
21,
22]. This is also true for the different players from the BSK group (i.e., QB, RB, TE, and LB), as players from these positions play closer to the line of scrimmage. As a result, these players will be more involved with the collisions inherent to football [
15,
51]. The junior college players from this study tended to be larger in stature across the different positions than Division III players that were investigated by Stuempfle et al. [
23]. Division III players do not receive athletic scholarships to play football, which would suggest that they are not the type of players to be recruited to more prominent Division I or II schools. Most positions were also comparable in height to Division I players, and the WR, TE, DB, and LB were similar in body mass compared to this population [
21,
22]. There were, however, differences in body mass for certain positions. The two QB from this study were almost 10 kg lighter than the QB from Secora et al. [
22], while the RB were approximately 5 kg lighter than those from Garstecki et al. [
21]. The LM from this study were between 10 and 20 kg lighter than Division I LM [
21,
22], which is a greater difference than that shown by Carbuhn et al. [
5]. Junior college players who wish to progress to Division I or II may need to increase body mass to be physically competitive. However, coaches should determine this with individual players they wish to recruit.
Due to the structure of the game, football heavily stresses a player’s anaerobic capacities, in particular linear and COD speed [
14,
15]. Interestingly, there were no significant differences in the 0–4.57 m sprint interval (
Table 2). This could relate to the high-intensity, acceleration demands placed upon all football positions due to the structure of the sport [
15]. In contrast to this, the SK players were faster than LM over the 0–9.14 m interval, and both the SK and BSK players were faster than LM over the 0–36.58 m interval. This was expected, as the players featured in these positon groups (e.g., RB, WR, and DB) are commonly the fastest players on a football team [
12,
13,
15,
20,
21,
22]. Additionally, the SK and BSK players have a heavy requirement for COD actions during match-play [
15]. Similar to previous research [
6,
13,
20,
22], the SK and BSK groups were faster in the tests of COD speed; the pro-agility shuttle and three-cone drill (
Table 2).
The findings from this study also highlighted the limitations in the linear and COD speed capacities of junior college football players. Although the subjects from this study were generally faster in the 36.58 m sprint and pro-agility shuttle in comparison to Division III football players [
23], when compared to Division I and II players assessed by Garstecki et al. [
21], the junior college players were slower across all positions. This was also the case when considering football players at the end of their collegiate careers who were entering the National Football League [
12]. Although Sierer et al. [
12] used slightly different position groups when compared to the current study (i.e., RB were placed in the SK group, defensive ends were in the BSK group, and QB were not analyzed), the junior college players from this research (data shown in
Table 2) were notably slower in the 36.58 m sprint (SK = ~4.542 s; BSK = ~4.787 s; LM = 5.257 s), pro-agility shuttle (SK = ~4.147 s; BSK = ~4.279 s; LM = 4.661 s), and three-cone drill (SK = ~7.116 s; BSK = ~7.254 s; LM = 7.855 s). The sample of junior college players from this study appeared to have limitations in linear and COD speed. Although improving speed in athletes can be challenging, recent meta-analyses and reviews of the literature have indicated that appropriate strength and sprint training can lead to improvements in running speed in trained individuals [
52,
53]. Ideally, to help prepare for the next level of collegiate play, junior college football players should attempt to improve all aspects of speed, including acceleration, maximal velocity, and COD speed. A range of modalities (e.g., free, assisted, and resisted sprinting; plyometrics; strength training) can be used to enhance running speed [
52,
54], so coaches should adopt these in the developmental training of junior college players. The coach should assess linear and COD speed for those individual players that are being recruited to their respective program, and use this data to target any shortcomings that may exist.
The SK group performed best in the VJ, SBJ, and relative SBJ (
Table 3). This is typical for WR and DB, who often exhibit high lower-body power measured by jump tests [
13,
20,
21,
22]. This is likely due to the nature of the WR and DB positions, where players will need to have a good VJ to contest the ball when it is in the air. However, the LM, possibly due to their greater body mass, generated a higher VJ peak power than the BSK and SK groups (
Table 3). In line with this, the BSK group also generated greater peak power than the SK group (
Table 3). The football players from this study were comparable in the VJ when compared to Division II players [
21], and superior when compared to Division III players [
23]. As for the speed tests, the Division I football players assessed by Garstecki et al. [
21] were superior across all positions in the VJ when compared to the junior college players from this research. This was also true when comparing the current studies’ subjects with the player groups analyzed by Sierer et al. [
12], who possessed VJ performances that were approximately 0.2 m superior to the SK, BSK, and LM groups from this research. In addition to this, the players analyzed by Sierer et al. [
12] were superior by approximately 0.3 m in the SBJ. Although this recommendation should be contextualized with the one school sample from this study, junior college football players should attempt to improve lower-body power when attempting to progress to Division I competition. Plyometrics is one training modality that should be emphasized in junior college players to enhance their lower-body power [
55,
56]. Coaches should also ascertain the lower-body power capabilities on a recruit-by-recruit basis. Given that lower-body power serves as a foundation for linear and COD speed [
18,
30], enhancements in this capacity could also translate to other traits important for football.
Strength is measured via different methods in football players, sometimes with 1RM tests [
5,
21,
22], or maximal repetition assessments [
12,
28,
38,
39], such as that from the current study. Maximal repetition tests assess strength endurance as opposed to maximal strength. As a result, it is difficult to contextualize the data from this study with previous research. Nevertheless, when using methods to normalize the strength assessment across different positions using tonnage, and ratio-scaled and allometrically scaled tonnage, no significant differences were established between the position groups (
Table 4). As previously noted, the coaches for this football squad did not test maximal strength due to a perceived risk of injury [
34,
35,
36]. When defined by maximal strength tests, BSK and LM have been shown to be the strongest players within a team [
15,
16,
21,
22]. However, as the loads used in this study were modified by position (i.e., the SK players lifted a lighter load) [
28], this essentially standardized the strength endurance data across all subjects. Maximal strength and strength endurance are important qualities for football players at all levels [
15,
21,
22], and strength training is a clear foundation for this sport [
8,
57]. However, the results from this study suggest that assessing strength endurance in American football players may not provide as useful information as maximal strength data. To provide more detailed information, future research should assess the 1RM of junior college players in strength tests common to football (e.g., bench press, front and back squat, power clean), to further profile the traits of these athletes.
There are certain limitations for this study that should be acknowledged. Due to lower numbers, the offensive (centers, guards, and tackles) and defensive (defensive tackles and ends) LM were combined into one group in this study. Future investigations of junior college football players should investigate these positions separately, if the sample size is appropriate. Furthermore, the sample from this study is only representative of the school from which they were recruited; the physical performance characteristics of the current subjects may not be typical of all junior college players. The sample size for the current study also did not permit between group comparisons, due to certain positions having very small sample sizes (e.g., QB = 2 subjects, TE = 1 subject). This also meant that the numbers between the three groups in this study were not equal (i.e., SK = 31; BSK = 18; LM = 13). Indeed, the playing group from this school featured a disproportionate number of WR and DB. It would seem likely that some of these players may switch positions closer to the start of the season; however, at the time of testing these were the positions for which the players declared. It would be beneficial for further analyses of junior college football players to draw from multiple schools to increase the sample size. This study also featured only muscular endurance tests as measures of strength, due to the philosophies of the coaching staff. Future research should investigate maximal strength qualities of junior college players. No physiological measures such as heart rate or blood lactate were taken in this study. The validity of using these measures in jump, speed, and strength tests has been questioned [
58,
59,
60], which is why there were not included in this research. Nonetheless, direct measurement of these physiological characteristics in response to typical football assessment could be an avenue for future studies. Within the context of these limitations, this is the first study to provide a comprehensive analysis of junior college football players. The results indicated that the characteristics of different position groups is typical of football players. However, the results of this study also highlighted that there are potentially certain traits (e.g., body mass, linear and COD speed, and lower-body power) that should be targeted for improvement when a junior college player transfers to a higher level of collegiate play.