Category: Sports

Five plays into the Eagles’ preseason opener against the Baltimore Ravens, Willie Lampkin introduced Ravens defensive tackle Broderick Washington’s backside to the grass — and, in turn, re-introduced himself to the NFL.

Lampkin, 24, had been hidden in plain sight for the past year. The Eagles claimed him off waivers at the end of camp from the Los Angeles Rams, who cut the 2025 undrafted free agent out of North Carolina with an injury designation due to knee and ankle injuries he suffered in their second preseason game. Two days later, the Eagles placed Lampkin on injured reserve for the remainder of the season.

The 5-foot-11, 290-pound interior offensive lineman returned to game action for the first time in 364 days like a wrecking ball, and Broderick was his first victim.

After snapping the ball at center, Lampkin quickly latched on to the 6-2, 315-pound defensive tackle and blocked him 10 yards downfield in pass protection before disposing of him into a pile of bodies.

Later at right guard, he sealed off 6-foot, 300-pound Aeneas Peebles on a Tank Bigsby run, taking him for a ride five yards downfield until the whistle before patting him on the helmet. That love between whistles never lasts longs, as his Eagles teammates know. Lampkin’s preseason excellence, which continued Saturday night against the New England Patriots, has been an extension of the effort they’ve witnessed in training camp this summer.

“I call him a bowling ball of knives, ’cause he’s so short, he’s so small, he’s so stubby, but he is so quick and powerful and precise with his hands that for a taller guy like me, it gives me a lot of trouble,” Jordan Davis said. “It gives me a lot of fits. That’s one of the things that keeps me up at night with Willie.

“He has a certain tenacity about him when he goes and plays a game.”

That tenacity, according to Lampkin, is rooted in his wrestling background.

Lampkin began wrestling as a freshman at Mulberry High School in Mulberry, Fla., a city in central Florida with a population of roughly 4,000. Within three years, he was the state tournament runner-up at heavyweight, and within four, he was a champion.

He ultimately chose to pursue football over wrestling in college, playing three seasons at Coastal Carolina and two at UNC before moving on to the NFL as an undrafted free agent. But as he vies for a depth spot on the Eagles’ initial 53-man roster as an undersized, undrafted interior offensive lineman, Lampkin continues to channel the mentality and the skill set he cultivated through wrestling.

“I feel like wrestling just helped me to be more gritty and just try to get after everybody,” Lampkin said.

Wrestlers the ‘ultimate combatants to deal with misery’

Former Mulberry wrestling coach Anthony Cerullo learned about Lampkin from Kyle Jones, one of the assistant football coaches at the school. Jones, who once wrestled for Cerullo in addition to playing football, wanted Lampkin to start wrestling, too.

Cerullo also played both sports. He understood that wrestling taught its athletes about balance, hand usage, and body positioning — all of the fundamentals that apply to sound play in the trenches.

He figured that Lampkin, a varsity starter on the offensive line as a freshman, was a 6-5 “behemoth” who grew faster than his peers. When he met him in line at the concession stand at a junior varsity football game, he quickly learned he was mistaken.

He still made his recruiting pitch.

“Coach Jones says you’re going to be on the wrestling team, and I’m the wrestling coach,” Cerullo said.

“Ah, I don’t know about that,” Lampkin said. “He hasn’t said anything to me about it.”

At the end of the football season, Lampkin had his exit interview with his coaches. Afterward, Cerullo grabbed Lampkin as he was leaving for the school bus. Wrestling season was already underway.

“Hey, the wrestling room is not on the bus,” Cerullo said.

Lampkin obliged and followed Cerullo, even though he wasn’t entirely sure why he was there. Early on, Lampkin said he stuck with wrestling because a few of his football teammates had also decided to try it out. Plus, he didn’t want to just go home at the end of the school day in the football offseason.

Cerullo had a plan for Lampkin. In addition to the fundamentals of wrestling that would translate to football, he said he knew the O-lineman would benefit from draining practice sessions on the mat in the long term.

“Wrestlers are the ultimate combatants to deal with misery, right?” Cerullo said. “So we have a saying as wrestlers called ‘embrace the grind.’ So that means that it’s going to suck, it’s going to be hot, it’s going to be sweaty, it’s going to be nasty. You have another person acrossfrom you for two-and-a-half hours a day that’s trying to kill you, and you have to embrace that lifestyle to be great.”

Cerullo ensured that Lampkin got that work in by serving as his practice partner. He learned firsthand of Lampkin’s athleticism. Lampkin, a heavyweight at roughly 230 pounds as a freshman, wasn’t going to run a 4.4 40-yard dash or jump over a building. But Lampkin was ultra-competitive, which drove his desire for improvement as he figured out how to use his hands and his body to his advantage.

He hated giving up a takedown. He hated not getting an escape. He hated losing. After all, Cerullo said, one person holding another down against their will is something to be taken personally, and Lampkin took every win for his opponent as a slight.

At the beginning, wins in practice were hard for Lampkin to come by against Cerullo, who was 20 years his senior and approximately the same size. Lampkin would ask Cerullo to stay after practice every day to work on different sequences, takedowns, and escapes. Those requests were particularly prevalent if Lampkin didn’t get an escape during practice.

Cerullo never went easy on Lampkin.

“So we sat there for an hour-and-a-half one practice, and me just breaking him down to his stomach and to his face until he finally exploded up and was able to get an escape,” Cerullo said. “And then to his credit, he’s like, ‘OK, I want to do it twice before I leave.’

“‘Like, Willie, I’ve got to go to work in the morning, buddy. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’”

It took about three weeks for Lampkin to embrace wrestling and the pain that came with it, Cerullo said. Pain turned to pride when he began to win his matches. According to Cerullo, there is something euphoric about the referee grabbing the winning wrestler’s hand at the end of the match and raising it for everyone to see.

Lampkin chased that feeling. He won 50 matches as a freshman, but he was one win shy of qualifying for the state tournament. That shortcoming fueled his offseason development. For the first time, he was lifting with intention to improve at both wrestling and football. He worked in the wrestling room to sharpen his skills, especially his hands.

“Willie has very large hands, and he learned how to make an impact when he put them on you going into that sophomore year,” Cerullo said. “When he would grab you, he had intention behind it. Where before, he was kind of just placing them and being … I’d say a big baby about it to some degree. Not understanding how strong he was. Sophomore year, he definitely knew what to do with his hands and when he put them on you, he meant to put them on you.”

Cerullo estimates that Lampkin took him down his freshman year twice in practice. In the summer leading up to his sophomore year, Lampkin took Cerullo down four times in one practice.

“He started moving his feet much better,” Cerullo said. “I think that he understood some more of the nuances of wrestling and not to put himself in those negative positions.”

From novice to state champion

That year, Lampkin would qualify for the state tournament, but he was eliminated early after being pinned. He transferred from Mulberry to nearby Lakeland High School the following year, helping the football team win a state championship as a junior. But leaving Mulberry didn’t mean he was leaving wrestling behind.

After the football season, Lampkin would lose weight quickly as he got in wrestling shape. He may have been the biggest wrestler on his team, but according to Lakeland assistant wrestling coach Winston Phan, he was a relatively light heavyweight compared to his peers. That weight class can be very one-dimensional, Phan said.

“A lot of times, they fall on top of each other, and whoever lands on top wins, right?” said Phan, who is now the head coach of the program. “But what Willie had going for him was his technique and his ability to learn all [this] new stuff that we were able to give him and allow him to use in his matches.

“Because people will tell you he didn’t wrestle like a heavyweight. They said he wrestled like somebody that was 106 pounds the way he knew how to do moves and the way he knew how to control somebody on top.”

Phan and the other coaches would teach Lampkin a little bit of everything, even moves that weren’t typically performed by heavyweights. Among them were leg attacks, Phan said. One of Lampkin’s favorite moves that he honed in practice was a single-leg sweep. He kept it in his back pocket until he reached the first-place match at the 2A state championship his senior year.

The prior year, Lampkin lost the state final in sudden-death overtime. He wouldn’t lose it twice. After he went 47-0 during the regular season, Lampkin faced Mason Arnold of Tampa Jesuit in the heavyweight state championship match. They were tied, 1-1, toward the end of the third period.

With 34 seconds remaining, Lampkin pulled out the single-leg sweep. Lampkin swung his body around his opponent’s leg, then flung him onto his back, switching off to a double leg to take him down and go up, 3-1. Lampkin rode Arnold out until time expired. He popped up, his headgear askew, and let out a roar before pouncing on top of Phan and assistant coach Chad Kirkman near the corner of the mat.

“It was like a potato jumping on a toothpick,” said Michael Farley, former Lakeland head wrestling coach.

That match marked the end of Lampkin’s wrestling career. His wrestling coaches still kept in touch with Lampkin as he continued on to college and attended his games when they could.

In some ways, the two sports couldn’t have been any different. Lampkin is one of 11 on the football field. In wrestling, he was alone against his opponent on the mat. A play in football lasts a matter of seconds within an hourslong game, while a wrestling match lasts at least six minutes over three periods. But whether Lampkin was wrestling or playing football, Phan saw the same athlete.

“He’s not doing anything differently,” Phan said. “They call the moves different things, but in the sense of it, the name of the game is manhandling your opponent, right? And he knows that that’s what his job is, and that’s what he’s looking to do every time he steps on the line, whether it’s on a wrestling mat or on the football field.”

In both sports, he used his relatively small size to his advantage. Both Cerullo and Phan said Lampkin’s best asset was his brain, as he was capable of understanding leverage and positioning. Combine that with fast feet in a small area of space on the gridiron, and Lampkin can get his leverage and change direction quickly to seal off bigger, taller defensive tackles.

He never lets up, either, whether he’s mustering a takedown in the waning seconds of the state title match or he’s blocking a defensive tackle into the next zip code through the whistle.

“It doesn’t matter who’s in front of him,” Phan said. “He’s ready to take their heads off and protect the quarterback and do what he has to do to be successful on the line.”

Farley had seen the headlines coming out of Eagles camp about Lampkin. Those labels about his size are nothing new.

“‘Five-11′ or ‘little secret weapon,’” Farley said. “But we know that for Willie, it’s real when the pads come on, and that’s when he can show his true value.”

After two standout preseason performances, the Eagles’ so-called little secret weapon might not be so secret any more.