When Mike McCarthy started M2 Quarterback Academy a little over five years ago, he had a small, but loyal, client base of 15-20 players who wanted to get better.
Now? Those players still want to get better, but McCarthy is working with a way bigger pool of signal callers.
“This year we worked with over 250 kids from all different states, all throughout New England and outside of New England,” McCarthy said.
But pure numbers don’t do justice for just how deep McCarthy’s footprint is here. If you’re talking about quarterbacks in Massachusetts, the number of scholarship offers has exploded in recent years, and McCarthy has played a big role in that. Actually, it might be tougher to find quarterbacks who have not worked with McCarthy in recent years.
“My passion is seeing these guys develop, and seeing these guys grow, and then getting an opportunity to play at the next level,” McCarthy said.
He’s succeeding in that. McCarthy hails from Martha’s Vineyard, where he was on a team that made the Super Bowl. He briefly stopped at Merrimack before going to Bridgewater State, where he later coached. He eventually went with quarterback training full time, and started M2.
More and more, you began to see McCarthy’s videos pop up with players throwing. Then, when COVID struck, McCarthy’s services became essential to local quarterbacks.
“Marketing thing kind of happened naturally,” McCarthy said. “With COVID, it was a necessity. That’s when things started to pick up for us, during that COVID area, because a lot of kids were around, and they were hungry, and they couldn’t play football. So we were able to still get on the field and train, do it the right way, do it safe. But the marketing piece was so important at that time, because that’s all that college coaches had to evaluate.”
More and more kids wanted to be a part of it. And they began going to McCarthy with the blessings of their high school coaches. Then college players and even pros — like Brian Hoyer — began to take part.
The whole thing snowballed, and the athletes swear by McCarthy’s tutelage.
“It just happened naturally,” McCarthy said. “We’ve just been going and going since we started. It’s continued to grow. I said to the kids, and I try to live by this motto, ‘Stay in your three-foot world, what’s right in front of you.’ We just focus on today. Focus on what we did yesterday, how we can improve on it. Focus on how we can do better tomorrow. If we just stick with that motto and do things the right way, it’s elevated through that.”
McCarthy is always trying to improve his craft. He spends countless hours researching, picking the brains of other quarterback coaches, and discussing methods on podcasts.
The drills McCarthy uses can be innovative, trying to best simulate what players see in a game.
“Drills that are game-like experience,” McCarthy said. “The ultimate is 11-on-11. You can’t replicate that through quarterback drills and quarterback training, but what you can do is create reaction stimulus where these guys have layered decision-making that they need to make in a drill. Whether it’s different movements, different pressures, different distractions, we try to layer our drills to get them in scenarios where they’re comfortable moving inside the pocket, outside the pocket. Making different reads, getting their eyes and feet in the right place.”
And even with a much higher group of players to work with, McCarthy takes pride in fostering the bond between them.
“I think it’s the community (that is special),” McCarthy said. “The community of quarterbacks that we have and the coaches that we have around. Our coaching staff does a really good job of relationship building, and showing that we truly care about these kids and their development. The camaraderie that comes with working in a small group setting, these guys are all high-level quarterbacks, and they’re competing against each other for scholarships, but they’re genuinely happy when one has success. I think it’s the family atmosphere we’ve created and the guys I’ve surrounded myself with.
“I don’t really credit myself. I credit New England and the kids’ hunger to succeed. Really, what we try to do is give them a blueprint: ‘If you want to have success, you have to do A, B, C, and D.’ You have to do it consistently, and you have to be motivated by it. Quarterback is the hardest position in all of sports, but it’s also the most rewarding. It’s more of a lifestyle than a position, and you need to live it year round.”
