Juniors Bradley Robinson and Peyton Dilbeck Robinson in each other’s corner in first season of making transition to defense and looking forward to playing big roles in tonight’s home game vs. Valparaiso

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com
New to defense in general and to cornerback in particular, juniors Peyton Dilbeck and Bradley Robinson will play in front of the biggest crowd of their lives tonight against their school’s chief rival, which carries a 13-game winning streak in the series into the game.
All that responsibility makes them look forward to the opportunity to face Valparaiso at home, which shows they have the right personalities to play a position about which they still have so much to learn.
“You get too emotional, and you lose focus,” Robinson said of the rivalry. “Peyton and I will try to be on our A game. We like being the guys who need to win us the game. I think we’re both going to be on our games. We need to dial it up. No touchdown.”
Throughout spring football and well into the summer, they both were listed on the offensive depth chart as reserves, Robinson at receiver and Dilbeck at running back. Halfway through summer camp, Robinson was the first to know that Dilbeck, a basketball teammate since they were in seventh grade, decided to switch positions.
A running back and receiver as a freshman and a running back as a sophomore, Dilbeck approached head coach Mark Peterson about switching to cornerback and he said that the coach told him he could do that, saying, “You do you.”
“I was the first one to know Peyton was going there and he told me I think we both should go to corner,” said Robinson, a receiver and safety on the freshman team and a receiver for JV. “I was like, ‘I think that’s a great idea. Why not?’ So, Peyton said, ‘All right, I’m going to corner,’ and I was like I might as well come with.”
So, Robinson did, but not until he was cleared to start practicing in the wake of a back injury suffered in basketball, a sport he has given up.
Two weeks into his switch, playing defense for the first time in his life, Dilbeck already was getting first-team reps. Robinson didn’t have his first day of practice until three weeks before the season-opening loss at Hobart, so he began the year as a reserve. Then he leaped, high-pointed the ball smoothly, intercepted a pass in the opener and has started every game since. Robinson’s second interception, again on a leap, came in a 34-14 win over LaPorte.
Dilbeck doesn’t have any picks yet, but he has used his speed well both in getting into the backfield to make key tackles and in closing on receivers. He plays more physically than most cornerbacks and at 6-0, 190 pounds brings good size to the position. Based on his impressive ability to get up, high interceptions like Robinson’s figure to be in his future to go with high and low tackles.
“It’s always nice tackling people, hitting people,” Dilbeck said. “It’s fun. It’s always going to be cool getting those third-down stops, fourth-down stops to get off the field.”
Athletically and in attitude, Dilbeck seems like an athlete born to play football. Yet, the first he played it was as a freshman.
“We used to not be able to tackle but Peyton has gotten a lot better,” Robinson said. “I’m more of an ankle-biter. I’ll go low. He’ll go up the shoulder pads and hit you hard. He’ll get you low and he’ll come up and hit you high too.”
Even with so little experience, the cornerbacks already have upgraded the position from a year ago.
Cornerbacks covering a wide receiver in single coverage often are referred to as being on an island. In one sense, neither Dilbeck nor Robinson is ever on an island. Close friends, they forever are there to review the finer points of their new shared challenge and to lift each other’s spirits.
“We talk one on one all the time about what needs to happen,” Robinson said. “We talk before every game. We’re hyping each other. After every game, we talk about what wrong, what we did well. We’re celebrating the wins together and we’re also talking about the losses together. We have a really good connection.
The juniors are walking into a tough challenge tonight against a Valpo squad with a deceptive 1-3 overall record against a tough schedule. The Vikings are 1-1 in the DAC and the Trojans are 2-2, 1-1.
If Dilbeck didn’t like tough challenges, he wouldn’t be returning punts, and he would not have as his career goal a profession that demands rushing into dangerous situations that have everyone else rushing out of as quickly as possible. He is training to become a firefighter.
“When I was a sophomore, my counselor handed me this list of vocations and I saw firefighting,” Dilbeck said. “I’m a very hands-on person. I need to get dirty whatever I do, so I told my counselor I have to do firefighting vocation next year, so then she set me up, and now I’m in it.”
Sep. 11 fell on a Thursday this year, the lightest practice day of the week, yet Dilbeck was exhausted. As part of his training, he joined firefighters decked out in full gear while walking the equivalent of 110 stories worth of stairs that day to honor the first responders from Sep. 11, 2001.
“Thursdays are walk-throughs, so it wasn’t too bad,” Dilbeck said.
Both novice cornerbacks mentioned refining their “eye discipline” as the key to improving.
“Eye discipline is a really hard thing because there are double moves,” Robinson said. “A receiver can cut one way and then come back the other way. The hardest thing is not trying to jump the route and being like, ‘Hey, I think he’s going here,’ instead of being patient and waiting for him to make the move and then staying with him.”
Dilbeck also mentioned eye discipline as an area that needs improvement and talked about other challenges to playing the position for the first time at the varsity level.
“The hardest thing is it’s a different level of being quicker and more athletic. There’s a guy running full speed right at you, and you have to stay with them running backwards,” Dilbeck said. “When you’re on offense, you know who’s getting the ball and who’s running what route. But at corner, you don’t know any of that, so you have to read that as the play’s going on.”
Dilbeck is the fastest player on the defense.
“He’s really athletic,” Robinson said. “He can rely on his speed. He does need to work on his eye discipline.”
Robinson explained how the time they spent on offense wasn’t wasted: “There are out routes and fade balls. I know where the quarterback is trying to place the ball and where I can go make a play on the ball. I also know when I look at the receiver’s hips, I know he’s trying to make a cut because I’ve been there.”
Also, he said, last season’s drills on “how to catch it, where to catch, when to catch it,” run by receivers coach Colton Tuzinski helped him to make his first two interceptions.
Robinson said his first pick in his first game at the position, just three weeks into his cornerback education, “boosted my confidence a lot. It allowed me to breathe and think: ‘I’ve got this. I can do this. I’m capable of being on this team and starting for us.’ And all my teammates are there to hype me up.”
That helped but didn’t make the stress of learning so much so quickly completely vanish.
“First game, Hobart, and even Morton, we were definitely feeling the nerves,” Robinson said. “Me more than Peyton because Peyton is more relaxed and he’s ready to go all the time. The Michigan City game and the LaPorte game, you don’t feel as many nerves because you’re used to it. You know what’s going to happen. You watch film.”
Still, it’s the nature of the position that other than when making an interception, a cornerback is noticed most when at the scene of a play that didn’t go his way.
“If Peyton lets up a big play, he gets down on himself,” Robinson said. “Being such close friends, we can communicate and pick each other right back up, because if you’re down, you play bad. You’re in your own head and you can’t think about anything but what’s happening in your head, so you can’t do that in the game. It’s important to stay up and keep a smile on your face.”
If Dilbeck and Robinson read the players they are assigned to cover as well tonight as they read their own roster in the summer, they’ll be up to the challenge. Their switch from offense has worked well for the team and for their snap totals.