A recent tweet of less than 70 characters by injured Eskimos middle linebacker J.C. Sherritt says all you need to know about Kenny Ladler this season.
“Perfectly ok to start that @kennyladlo is one of the best players in the league talk” Sherritt posted on Twitter.
Ladler, a second-year linebacker, is one of only four Edmonton defensive players to play in every game this season. He leads the team with 43 defensive tackles, ranks among the CFL leaders with three interceptions and has made 39 defensive plays over the last five games.
“I do appreciate J.C. with that shout-out,” said Ladler, who plays on the strong side or wider side of the field. “That’s big coming from someone who actually won that (most outstanding defensive player) award. Just having him back me and noticing my play early in the season, it just shows the work I’ve been putting in and the progression that I’ve had from last year to this year. It shows how much better I’ve gotten.
“I want to just continue to get better and make my case for that statement that J.C. had tweeted,” he added. “My teammates are relying upon me so I’ve got to be the guy that they depend upon. A lot of guys have been getting hurt, a lot of changes have been made, but just consistency in getting better in my play is a requirement right now for the defence.”
Ladler, 25, who calls himself “a downhill tackler,” has always had a nose for the ball, but felt he lost some of that when he sat out the 2015 season.
“That’s one of the things I wanted to improve in my game this year,” he said. “Get back to making plays around the ball more than I did last year.”
He has also stepped up with big plays when the Eskimos needed them the most, with all three of his interceptions this season coming in the fourth quarter and one of them being caught in the end zone.
“That’s the most important part of the game,” he said. “Once somebody needs to make a play on defence, I want to be able to step up and make that play to turn things around for this team for us to be able to put ourselves in the best possible position to win.”
While Ladler wants the reputation of being one of the top defensive players in the league by being consistent with his play each week, he knows it wasn’t that long ago he was running around on the field “like a chicken with my head cut off.”
He said the difference this season compared to last year is “night and day,” from what he’s doing on the field to being comfortable with the defensive scheme to understanding the CFL game.
“Just playing all of those snaps last year and then coming in this year, I know the expectation and what it takes,” he said. “I’ve improved a lot. This year, I’m more focussed, I’m more locked in on what the offence is trying to do to us and I’m kinda staying ahead of the game.”
Ladler, who said he has taken his film study and preparation to a new level, had to get some rust off his game when he joined the Eskimos. He had spent the 2014 season with the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, starting out on the practice roster as an undrafted free agent and eventually playing two games on special teams before breaking his forearm. He was released the next year in the first wave of training camp cuts.
He went to the Eskimos’ tryout camp at Vero Beach, Fla., in April 2016 because he was training just a couple of hours away, was invited back for the three-day mini-camp and then to training camp in Edmonton, working out with the starting unit from the beginning.
His CFL career got off to a slow start because he had to adjust to the bigger field and the different routes and movement of the receivers. He relied upon the veterans in the defence, like Sherritt and fellow linebacker Deon Lacey and defensive halfback Brandyn Thompson.
Everything started to change after the Labour Day Classic.
“I had an interception for a touchdown against Calgary,” he said. “That really sparked my confidence for the rest of the year that I can be a play-maker for this team. After that, I just gained more comfort out there within the passing game.”
The interception-return touchdown was Ladler’s first since high school.
“To do that in a game of that magnitude was one of the coolest moments I’ve had up here in CFL,” he said.
He also made an interception with 1:25 left in the 2016 East Division semifinal against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats to set up Edmonton’s game-winning field goal.
Ladler started 39 games at free safety – including nine games as a true freshman – and played in all 50 of his college games with Vanderbilt University in Nashville. During that time, the Commodores played in three post-season bowl games and went from being a doormat in the powerful SEC (the Southeastern Conference) to a program with a winning record during his junior and senior years.
After his senior year, Ladler and four of his Vanderbilt teammates had a private tryout with New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick.
“It was actually one of the hardest workouts I went through during the workout process, like the combine and stuff like that,” Ladler said. “We sat down and watched film with him. He’s still the same guy every time as you can tell with his interviews; same monotone voice and everything, but still a good dude to talk football with.”
Ladler had an embarrassing moment at the NFL combine for graduating college prospects when he tripped after running his 40-yard dash and ended up doing a somersault.
“Once I was running my 40, I had a cramp going on in my calf muscle,” he explained. “It was difficult to stop once I finished running, so I had a little somersault and a hard fall.”
His fall felt devastating at the time because it probably hurt his chances of leaving a good impression with the NFL scouts in attendance, but he says, “it’s kind of funny to me now.”
Ladler now plays on a defence that celebrates quarterback sacks with somersaults, but he’s only attempted one with the Eskimos so far … and failed!
“In the process of the somersault, one of the other team’s linemen stopped me,” he said. “I was rolling and he walked in front of me and stood there so I couldn’t complete my somersault.”
He said he always tries to have fun while playing football, but the Eskimos take that to a whole new level for him.
“They’re always celebrating, joking, talking smack to the other team. It’s part of my game that I really didn’t have at Vanderbilt.”
Ladler grew up in a family with four children in the Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain, Ga. They were an athletic family, always playing various sports year round.
“I used to be the king of dodge ball.”
He was in Houston for the NFL’s Super Bowl week last year, but didn’t go to the game.
“That would have been a heart-breaker anyway because Atlanta lost,” he said, referring to New England scoring 19 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to tie the game and then winning in overtime. “It just hurt me to see that.”
His off-season last winter included a Caribbean cruise and travelling to Ottawa with his girlfriend, Mercedes Dericho, to first audition and then film an episode that is expected to air in the fall for the CBC Television show Dragon’s Den. Entrepreneurs pitch their products on the reality show in hopes of acquiring financial backing. Dericho runs an online Miami bikini company, Risque Dukes Swim Apparel.
But Ladler was most excited during the off-season to finally acquire a Toy Pomeranian he named Goku, after a character in a TV show he watched when he was little.
“I have the coolest dog ever,” he said.
Ladler had difficulty finding a Toy Pomeranian before coming across one on a flight to Miami after returning to Vanderbilt for an event. The dog’s owner told Ladler that he bought the dog from a breeder in Calgary and the breeder then set everything up for Ladler once he returned to Edmonton for training camp.
“It was like I found him without even trying at that point after a year of searching websites and stuff,” he said.