College athletes find ways to maintain training while social distancing

CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, Va. -- For college athletes, trying to stay in shape while social distancing can be tough without trainers, teammates or equipment accessible. But a Virginia based football training program is helping quarterbacks stay prepared for when their season returns.

Malcolm Bell is a former quarterback from Henrico high school and North Carolina Central who now works as a specialty coach for quarterbacks in Central Virginia.

He created Undefeated Quarterback training and has worked with some of the most promising young athletes at the position.

But in these days of social distancing, Bell has had to scale back his camps from over a dozen players at a time to just a handful of college players.

"I'm out here about four hours a day right now, just making sure everybody can get some work in. I just don't want anybody to be left behind," Bell said.

One of the players who Bell continues to work is Brandon Clark, the former Manchester standout who is finishing up his first year at Notre Dame.

Clark has spent the past season on the scout team for the Irish, but is in a tight competition to be the main backup this fall.

"I learned a lot. It is a pretty big jump as far as the speed of the game and trying to learn a whole new offense in terms of one year," Clark said. "I think it was good for me to be immersed in the speed of the game and the atmosphere of the game. I thought it was pretty beneficial. I had fun."

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How a former NC Central star is getting Duke QB Quentin Harris ready for the NFL draft

Quentin Harris used to be Malcolm Bell.

That sentence probably requires a bit of an explanation. No, there wasn’t some sort of freaky Friday, body switch experiment going on in Durham in 2016. The former Duke quarterback didn’t live a day in the life of the former North Carolina Central quarterback, fooling everyone while hilarity ensued. “I remember wearing a red 15,” Harris recalled. “I knew of him vaguely, obviously we played that year and they were pretty good. I actually emulated him on the scout team in practice. Aside from that, I didn’t meet him. I was definitely aware of him.”

But for at least one week, Harris did pretend to be Bell. The Blue Devils and Eagles opened the 2016 season against each other and Harris, then a freshman, drew the assignment of playing Bell, a senior at the time, on the Duke scout team.

In an example of life coming full circle, when Harris was looking for a quarterback trainer to prepare for the upcoming NFL Draft, it was Bell who worked out his former doppelganger.

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Malcolm Bell