When North Vancouver’s Adam Zaruba arrives in Green Bay later this week the Canadian rugby star will face one of his biggest athletic challenges to date – but this one will involve the pigskin rather than a rugby ball.
On July 24, Zaruba signed a three-year contract with the Philadelphia Eagles.
And on Thursday Zaruba will face his real first test as a National Football League athlete when the Eagles face the Green Bay Packers in an exhibition match, one of four pre-season games scheduled for the coming month.
“It’s been really great,” Zaruba says from a hotel room in Philadelphia, where the team has been involved in a rigorous training camp for the last few weeks. “I’m grinding pretty hard right now.”
The schedule has been tight and the days long leading up to the start of the NFL pre-season.
Zaruba says the team has been pulling almost 12-hour days as players go through an intense workout and training regime, coupled with team meetings.
He admits that he’s facing an uphill battle as he grinds to make the team’s active roster, but the decision to transition from playing rugby at the highest level with the Canadian rugby sevens team to trying his shot at professional football wasn’t necessarily a hard one.
“If an opportunity like that comes up it’s hard to pass up, especially considering I’ve always kind of wanted to give that a shot if that’s something that’s available to me,” Zaruba says.
Here’s how it happened: In May, right at the end of the Canadian rugby sevens team’s season, Zaruba was contacted by an independent sports agent from South Africa that specialized in recruiting football talent.
“He saw me playing and thought, ‘Wow, I think he could play in the NFL.’
“He messaged me and got in contact with me and asked me if that’s something that I’d be interested in pursuing,” Zaruba explains.
“I said, ‘Absolutely. I am interested in that.’”
From there, Zaruba had to create a highlights tape and compile a bunch of information about his athletic skills in order to send it off to prospective NFL teams.
“It’s actually pretty incredible how this whole thing came to be. I said to myself, ‘OK, I need to switch my focus here. I need to start doing some football training.’ So I contacted all the people that I knew who could help and everyone put their hand up,” he says.
Zaruba graduated from Carson Graham Secondary in 2009, having spent much of his time in high school playing both football and rugby. He played football briefly at SFU before getting picked up by Team Canada to play rugby sevens in 2013.
Suffice to say, he made plenty of contacts in the sports world ready to help him achieve his dream of playing pro football.
Besides the outpouring of verbal support from the community, he mentions UBC football head coach Blake Nill and SFU’s Derek Hansen for their efforts in jumping in to give Zaruba a crash course in football prior to his Eagles tryout.
“I had a very short window of time to prepare for this workout,” he says.
Nill, Hansen and others helped Zaruba get reacquainted with handling a football, taught him some basic running patterns and plays, and helped condition him for the specific sprinting and athleticism required of football.
“One thing you can’t teach is size and speed. I wanted to show them that I was a big guy who could move well,” he says. “I think that I showed them enough in that regard that it piqued their interest and they wanted to see where it went. And now we’re here.”
On the weekend of July 21 Zaruba, who stands 6-5 and weighs 265 pounds, flew to Philadelphia for a workout and tryout with the team.
He signed with them a few days later.
Besides his recent foray into football, Zaruba has been one of Canada’s top rugby stars for several seasons, including most recently helping the Canadian sevens team to a bronze medal at the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series tournament in London in May.
He has played rugby for the Capilano Rugby Club for many years as well.
Asked how his teammates and friends from the rugby community have reacted to his newfound foray into football, Zaruba responds that it has been all positivity.
“I’ve got a crazy outpouring of support from the community, from my friends and team,” he says. “They’re all really stoked for this opportunity for me.”
Although he signed a three-year contract with the Eagles, that deal being honoured is contingent on Zaruba being selected for the team’s active roster, an answer he’ll know at the end of the Eagles’ pre-season when the team gets narrowed down from its current 90-man roster into a tight 53-member unit for the regular season.
“My goal here is to make it as far as I can. I want to make the active roster. It’s going to be very challenging – I’m fighting an uphill battle,” he admits, citing many of the players that have been training since the early spring or come from a background that involved more football.
“My head’s been spinning a lot.”
Still, Zaruba says he’s been getting better every week and now that the team is implementing everything at an accelerated rate due to the start of the preseason he’s fighting harder than ever before.
He’ll continue to fight hard to make the team, he says, because for him it’s all about unfinished business, both personally and professionally.
On the professional side, Zaruba says he has always wanted to flush out a football career because that’s originally what he went to university to play – and until now it hadn’t worked out.
On the personal level, it’s largely about his grandfather.
“He always was a huge advocate of me playing rugby and football. He was a huge fan of football,” he explains. “He always told me he thought I had what it took and, unfortunately, he passed away last year.
“He won’t get to see this, but it’s kind of like I want to prove him right. I want to do that for him.”
