Chiefs’ Travis Kelce shares advice he can give young players drafted by KC
The Chiefs have eight picks in this week’s NFL Draft and when all the selections have been made, they also will sign a bunch of undrafted free agents.
That means there will be a whole bunch of new faces at the Chiefs facility when the full team gathers. And they’ll meeting someone they already know by reputation: Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. His teammates have often spoken about how well they’ve been welcomed by Kelce.
On his New Heights podcast, Kelce was asked this week if he had any advice for new players, and if he would have done anything different as a rookie knowing what he knows now.
“When you’re a rookie, you could just get up and go,” Kelce said. “And on top of that ... my first couple years I was dealing with injuries, so I was in Kansas City, and I was working on rehab, and I was working on strengthening a lot of things more than I was working on my overall game.”
Kelce, 35, revealed there were at least seven consecutive offseasons in which he underwent some sort of surgery.
That, he said, forced him to be in the Chiefs facility more than he admittedly might have been had he been healthy and ready to have fun away from football.
While glad for not having off-the-field troubles as a young player, Kelce shared a piece of advice for young players: Find a life balance.
“Everybody’s different, but at the same time, we kind of mentioned it before this, you have to be real with yourself,” Kelce said. “You have to be hard on yourself, your own worst critic on what you’ve got to get better at. And the entire offseason, you need that yin and yang of like professional life and and non-professional life of being able to have that happy medium. Because the grind of the season is six months. If you’re lucky, it’s six months.
“But it is a six-month grind of you’re going into the facility having the exact day every single Monday, every single Tuesday, you know what I mean? So you want to be able to get away from the game so that it’s fresh when you come back in and you feel that excitement and motivation, like it’s the first day of school or something. So I would always tell people be real with yourself. Figure out exactly what you need to do, find what that means in terms of how you’re going to get better at that and achieve that.
“And then on top of that, get away from the game a little bit. Don’t be afraid to go out there and see something you haven’t seen before. Go to a new place, or take that vacation with your family. Step away, recharge, get that going, because it’s only going to make you work harder and feel more refreshed and ready to go when you come back.”
