“I grew up in the Lansing area — so many of my friends who I played football with did nothing with their lives,” Thornhill said. “Then, I went and played football at State. I started to realize many of the players I played with didn’t have a game plan for life after football. Education was pushed to the backseat.”

The 4th and 1 Football Camp was founded in 2010 by Daron Roberts, a special teams coordinator and wide receivers coach at West Virginia University and formerly an assistant secondary coach for the Detroit Lions, and held its first session at Northeast Texas Community College in Mt. Pleasant, Texas. Thornhill took the idea and expanded it to his hometown of Lansing and opened it up to 45 students, handpicked through an application process.

The weeklong camp targets marginalized groups of area high school athletes and allows them to work on their football skills as well as many helpful life attributes. The camp also partners with THE RUSH, which captures video highlights of the participating players and delivers them to smartphones and computers of parents tracking their child’s progress.

During their time on campus, the students are housed at Wonders Hall and will spend their days in creative workshops with lessons in dinner etiquette, nutrition, ACT preparation and yoga sessions, among others.

The morning yoga sessions with the athletes are led by Lauren Long, an Okemos resident and yoga instructor at Yoga State, 515 E. Grand River Ave. Despite most of the athletes lacking yoga experience, Long said yoga can be helpful in teaching them focus and concentration that expands from the classroom to the football field.

“It’s interesting how the men — these guys — are so strong,” Long said. “They can get into a lot of postures that, say, women can’t do. … It’s interesting how they start coming to classes and can do a lot more than they think they can.”

For some students such as Alante Sims, a 16-year-old Lansing resident and running back at Waverly High School, the camp is about getting better both on and off the football field.

Sims said he was drawn to the camp after one of his coaches encouraged him to apply for it. With the camp concluding on Friday, Sims said surviving the heat on the field and the mental stress of ACT preparation will make him a better person at the end of the week.

“(The best part) is just getting the information they have to offer us like how to eat right, how to be a good athlete and also the school work,” Sims said. “Mainly, (my goal) is to do better on the (ACT) we take at the end before we leave and to come out here and get as much information as I can to make myself a better person and better football player.”