Jaycee Horn named team’s Ed Block Courage Award winner

Horn suffered a broken foot in Week 3 of his rookie season, which knocked him out for the rest of the year. It was a difficult process for the first-round pick, who was already showing signs of being the kind of shutdown corner you expect when you take one with the eighth overall pick.

But the hardest part for Horn was occasionally the isolation he felt. Injured players are there but not really there, so his absence from the normal routine was as much of an adjustment as the physical pain.

“Being around your teammates, just being around football, makes you feel like you’re part of the team,” Horn said. “Because when you’re hurt, you’re not in practice, you’re not in meetings, you feel like you’re kind of just existing. Being around teammates definitely helped.”

Things were going well for Horn throughout the offseason, and through the spring, he was feeling good and eager to get back out one the field.

But when he arrived in Spartanburg for training camp, he began to feel a new sensation, a soreness in his foot which sidelined him for weeks of the prep work he had been building up to.

“In camp, I kind of struggled with it,” he said. “I had been doing good all offseason, but when I got to camp, it got sore on me, so that was kind of frustrating. Because in OTAs, I felt great playing on it every day. In the offseason, when I was training, I felt great. But as soon as I got to camp, it got achy and started bothering me, which it hadn’t done in three months. So that was the most frustrating part.

“The things I did to get through it, I just surrounded myself by my teammates. We were in Wofford, so we were around everybody a lot. This (athletic) training staff, they just kept me in the right headspace, kept me rehabbing and doing the necessary things.”