Buchtel graduate shaping into NFL prospect

In the few months since he left the University of Tennessee, Antonio Reynolds insists that he has changed.

The Buchtel High School graduate is not just talking about the cheeseburgers and fried food that he gave up to lose about 15 pounds before the NFL Draft this weekend, although he conceded that, ”I can’t eat all that stuff no more.”

The Vols’ two-year starter at defensive end said the time that he spent training at Velocity Sports in South Florida with his agent’s other clients was a football revelation.

”I’m not the same player I was in college,” Reynolds said. ”I’ve improved so much. There’s so many things I’ve learned I wasn’t doing. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in.”

Most of the awakening came from sessions at Velocity led by five league veterans, including Leonard Marshall, a two-time Pro Bowl defensive end for the New York Giants in the 1980s.

”He taught us a lot, tricks, technique things and different stuff I didn’t know,” Reynolds said.

The facility is owned by Michael Timpson, who played receiver for nine years for the New England Patriots, Chicago Bears and Philadelphia Eagles. Exclusive two-hour sessions twice a day gave the prospects of the Goal Line Football agency plenty of individual attention.

”There was a lot of speed stuff, change of direction, flexibility; we worked on that a lot,” Reynolds said.

It might sound like Reynolds is dissing the staff at Tennessee. But defensive ends coach Steve Caldwell, who recruited Reynolds, doesn’t see it that way.

”Any time you’re able to spend 24 hours a day around something . . . we meet for an hour and practice for two hours,” Caldwell said. ”Guys who talk with you and work with you who have played the game, that experience is unbelievable.”

A candidate to switch to outside linebacker in the pros, Reynolds might be selected on Sunday but will have to battle his way up from obscurity. He already has done it once, when he was forced to give up his scholarship at the University of Miami because of questions about his college entrance exam. To get his academics in order, he went to Hargrave (Va.) Military Academy en route to Tennessee.

”He’s off the radar a little bit, not a highly-rated guy at all,” NFL Network draft analyst Mike Mayock said. ”Losing that much weight to convince people what you are . . . he’s a late-rounder, at best.”

Caldwell said Reynolds, 6-foot-33/4 and now about 260 pounds, needed to trim down.

”He got so big; he may have gotten too big,” Caldwell said. ”But he played well down the stretch in the last six games.

”There’s still more to him, I’ve told him that all along. He makes special plays. It’s playing more consistent, and that comes with experience.”

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