A lingering knee injury from his senior season at Mater Dei High hampered the highly recruited cornerback and shook his confidence
LOS ANGELES — As a freshman at USC, Domani Jackson found himself in an unusual position.
Used to being one of, if not the, top athlete on the field as a cornerback at Mater Dei, Jackson was limited in his first year as a Trojan. He had torn a tendon in his knee the first game of his senior year of high school.
Now in college, it took a few games before he was ready to play. Then some weeks, he had to shut his work down again to allow more recovery time. He was in limbo between modest contributor and sideline observer, unable to play to the standard he’d established from himself.
“Coming from a prestigious high school and coming to college and just sitting on the sidelines, stuff like that. You know you could be out there,” Jackson said. “You gotta just take it slow. It was a little tough at first. But it’s always good to overcome something in your life, so I think I overcame that.”
It wasn’t until after his freshman year that Jackson began to feel almost back to his healthy self. And he’s trying to use spring football as a springboard to something greater as a sophomore.
The big difference for Jackson this camp is confidence. As he began to play on his surgically repaired knee for the first time last year, there was still the lingering doubts that comes from a major injury.
“It’s difficult at first, not just trusting your body. And I wasn’t really trusting my body,” Jackson said. “I obviously struggled coming off the knee surgery. Just getting that confidence, it plays a big role in your play. So my knee, I think I’m real confident in my knee this year.”
Jackson is still cleaning some of the rust off his game this spring. He’s honing old techniques and trying to recapture the burst in his speed that helped him tie the California state record in the 100-meter dash.
He understands that to do so, he has to work through fatigue and soreness and not take any days off. And he’s sticking to that regimen, staying late after practices to work with defensive backs coach Donte Williams on footwork and technique.
“In high school, I would just out-physical everybody, faster than everybody. But in college, it’s a different story,” Jackson said. “You actually have got to know the game of football, which Donte and everybody have been trying to really get me right in that.”
Jackson has been able to take more control over his availability this spring, though, with head coach Lincoln Riley saying this camp has been the most sustained stretch of practices that Jackson has been able to stack together since arriving at USC.
“We’ve got to get him settled in to a point where he can really turn loose and play aggressive all the time because when he does that, you see the strength, you see the length, you see the top-end speed,” Riley said. “You can really see him day to day where he’ll do some things well and then he’ll make a mistake, but then he’ll be able to correct it the next day and then keep going forward.”
