‘We outworked someone today’: How Trey Lance’s father — and a man who doesn’t exist — made the 49ers QB

The whispers entered the bedroom before any hint of sunlight.

“Dad?”

During the night, the temperature had dropped to a steal-your-breath kind of cold. Inside, the covers were nice and warm. It would feel so good to sleep one more hour. Two more would be glorious. But now the whispers had reached the edge of the bed.

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“Dad? Are you ready to go?”

Carlton Lance’s eyes blinked open, and instantly he was on the move.

The whispers came from his oldest son, Trey, an invitation to a daily routine. Their destination: the local YMCA, which opened its doors at 5 a.m. A few minutes later, Carlton would step out of the chill with Trey right behind him.

“Every single time — every single time — that man hopped out of bed and said, ‘You bet!'” Angie Lance said of her husband. “In Minnesota the mornings are cold, and Carl has a very demanding job, and I know there had to be times when he wanted to sleep in. But there was not one time when that kid would have ever felt that. Carl jumped out of bed every time.”

Carlton, 50, was a standout cornerback at nearby Southwest Minnesota State University in the early 1990s and had a short professional career that included a training camp stint with the 49ers. Some at the YMCA on those winter days might have recognized him from his playing days — he was inducted into the school’s athletic hall of fame in 2011 — or because he was a defensive backs coach for the local high school team. Still others might have known him as the co-owner of a financial services company he started 13 years ago.

These days, of course, he’s mostly known around town as Trey’s dad.

In April, the 49ers drafted Trey No. 3 overall. His ceiling seems as high as any San Francisco quarterback since Steve Young, but anyone searching for where Lance’s ascent began probably ought to start at the YMCA on South A Street in Marshall, Minn., a town of 13,500 residents 35 miles from the South Dakota border.

The family’s been going there since Trey was little. In fact, Carlton saved a voicemail 3-year-old Trey left for him at work one day: Dad, me and Mom are going to go to the YMCA in a couple of seconds. Could you hurry?

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Trey first started talking about playing Division I sports in seventh grade, and that’s when the 5 a.m. routine began. His brother, Bryce, two years Trey’s junior and heading off to play wide receiver at North Dakota State this year, later joined the outings.

Carlton had one rule: He’d never set an alarm or be in charge of rousing the boys. He was eager to work with them, to help polish away any weaknesses, to impart every bit of wisdom he’d picked up from Houston to Saskatchewan to London to Rocklin, Calif. But he was wary of pushing so hard he’d drive them away.

“‘I’m not going to wake you up,'” Carlton recalled telling them. “‘You wake me up and I’m not ever going to say no.’ So (Trey) started doing it. And that became our thing.”

The workouts initially occurred at night, but that was no good. There were high school games the boys wanted to watch, birthday parties to attend, spelling tests the next day. The predawn morning was empty and quiet. It was perfect. As Carlton would say, there wasn’t anyone trying to steal their time.

As they left the gym every morning, the sun up and the morning crowd trickling in, Carlton would turn to his son and tell him the same thing he’d said the day before — and the same thing he’d repeat the next day, too.

“Hey, we outworked someone today. The other guy is still sleeping.”

The other guy had a name: Aubrey.

It’s Carlton’s middle name and also the name of his nemesis. Aubrey’s existence starts to explain how driven Carlton is.

Carlton grew up in Queens, N.Y., before his family relocated to Fort Myers, Fla., as he was entering high school. There he played for a football coach with connections to a couple of schools in Minnesota — Mankato State and Southwest Minnesota State, or Southwest State, as it was known at the time, an NAIA school with around 3,000 students.

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“You could drive through the town and you wouldn’t even know there was a school here,” Carlton said.

He was the first member of his family to graduate from college, earning a business degree with a minor in marketing. In addition to starring at cornerback and running track for the Mustangs, he met Angie, who grew up the daughter of a baseball coach in Marshall and wasn’t into football — or football players — until meeting Carlton before their senior year.

After his final college football season, Carlton received an invitation to the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis. He remembers performing poorly in a couple of the drills, putting up 11 repetitions in the bench press — “I’m so much stronger than this!” he remembered telling himself — and running a 4.6-second 40-yard dash, too slow for any cornerback, much less a small-school prospect trying to make a splash.

He wasn’t drafted, but he was offered a spot in the Houston Oilers’ training camp later that year. He decided he had to push himself far harder for that audition than he had for the combine.

That’s when Aubrey materialized.

Back then there were no high-tech training facilities. Southwest State didn’t have any sort of offseason program or even a strength coach. So Carlton trained himself — and provided his own extra motivation.

Using his middle name, he conjured up a competitor, a relentless rival gunning for the same spot on the Oilers roster.

“I had to self-motivate,” he said. “So in my own mind I created a guy named Aubrey, and I would tell myself, ‘Hey, he’s working out right now. He’s at the gym right now.’ I got fanatical about it, honestly. I’d get up in the middle of the night and go for a jog.”

Carlton didn’t stick around with the Oilers, but he did play full seasons with the CFL’s Saskatchewan Roughriders in 1993 and the London Monarchs of the World League in the spring of 1995.

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In between, he got an opportunity of a lifetime: to join a Ray Rhodes-led 49ers defense that included defensive linemen Rickey Jackson and Bryant Young, linebacker Ken Norton Jr. and a loaded secondary with Eric Davis, Merton Hanks, Tim McDonald and, starting late that summer, Deion Sanders. The team’s offensive coordinator was Mike Shanahan. The ball boy — and the guy who made sure the wires to Shanahan’s headset didn’t get tangled on the sidelines — was his 14-year-old son Kyle.

Carlton remembered Rhodes giving the defensive backs an expletive-laced warning about making sure Jerry Rice didn’t get hurt during practice: “Don’t fall down near him, don’t touch him, don’t slip next to him, don’t make him fall. If you do, I’m gonna send your ass home on the bus.”

Rhodes’ words were etched in Carlton’s brain while encountering Rice on a running play. He carefully avoided the star receiver on his way to the ball carrier, but Rice didn’t return the favor.

“He comes up and pushes me over the pile,” Carlton said with a laugh. “And I looked at him and said, ‘Well, ain’t this a bitch? Jerry Rice is gonna pancake block me out here on an open pile.'”

Carlton asked running back Dexter Carter when the team would hold its rookie show, then a staple of NFL training camps and something he’d already experienced in Houston. Carter shook his head and said the 49ers didn’t do frivolous things like that anymore. The only time they partied, he said, was after the Super Bowl.

“I was like, ‘Damn — that’s what I’m talking about,'” Carlton said. “That moment stayed with me, that this organization is serious about winning. And that’s the kind of culture that they have. I wanted to be part of that so bad.”

After playing cornerback all his life, the 49ers asked Carlton to switch to safety, which turned out to be a nearly impossible request. He over-thought situations. Carlton remembered hesitating when the tight end went in motion ahead of one play.

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“I just froze,” he said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I should follow. I have zero ability to do anything.’ And I knew right then I was going to get cut. … And I was like, ‘They can’t have me out here, honestly. I get it.'”

Two weeks into camp, Carlton was released. He left disappointed, but with plenty of memories and lessons he’d later share with his kids. He called a friend from Rocklin and predicted the 49ers would win the Super Bowl that season. He was right: Six months later, they trounced the Chargers, 49-26.

A year after he was let go by the 49ers, Carlton Lance’s professional career was over. He returned to Marshall, got a coaching job at his alma mater and married his college sweetheart, Angie.

Then his fan club started to expand.

“He learned pretty early — as every dad does — that they were watching his every move,” Angie said of her boys. “Carl would mow the yard, and Trey would want a little mower to mow right behind him. Carl would go golfing, Trey would want a set of golf clubs to play with his dad. Carl would wash the car; Trey wanted to wash the car, too. Trey really was his little sidekick.”

Carlton’s professional playing career might be described as modest, but to Trey and Bryce it was epic.

Carlton still winces at the recollection of his combine experience. Trey, meanwhile, said he wore the sweatsuit his dad was issued — Russell Athletic sweatshirt and sweatpants — every chance he’d get. “When I was little I’d wear them around the house,” Trey said. “I’d (wind) the drawstring around the sweatpants like eight times.”

Carlton’s college number, No. 9, was mythologized by the boys, and jersey-issue days brought breathless anticipation over whether they’d land it. (No. 5, which Carlton wore in high school and which Trey now has with the 49ers, was considered a strong consolation prize.) The family dog, Niner, isn’t named after Trey’s new team but Carlton’s old number.

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The trips to the YMCA also were about trying to be like dad. The name Aubrey came up routinely.

“He talked about it a lot — that situation of picturing someone that’s out there outworking you,” Trey said. “And even if you don’t really know or it’s not a real person, just picture someone out there who’s outworking you and not letting up.”

Trey didn’t have to invent his own Aubrey because he knew all about his actual rivals. They had real names and faces; he read about them on recruiting websites and watched their games on YouTube.

“I could always find guys my age who were playing at bigger schools,” Trey said. “My biggest thing was watching kids who were my age, in a similar situation. I was competing against those guys.”

Carlton said it soon became evident there wasn’t much he could do at the YMCA to improve Trey’s game.

He knew from his cornerback days that a quarterback’s toughest throw was to the sideline from the far hash marks and that subpar passers would toss “lollipops” to get the ball there. Trey’s throws came on a rope. Carlton knew the swing passes a quarterback tossed to the tailback could be tricky depending on the placement, so Carlton lined up in the backfield and gave his son every scenario he could think of.

“And he put it right on me 10 out of 10 times,” he said. “And I’m like, ‘OK. There’s not a lot of weakness here.’ I was trying to figure out what I really needed to work on.”

So the father helped his son sharpen his skills in other ways.

A lot of mothers worry about their children’s screen time. For Angie Lance, those concerns included her husband. Carlton was so avid about film study that she sometimes woke up in the middle of the night to find her husband illuminated by a device.

After games, Carlton would ask Trey how he thought he played. Early on, the answer invariably was: “Good. It was good.”

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Said Angie: “Then Carl would say, ‘Well, do you want to know what I think? I believe that you think you played well. I believe that you think you played hard. But I think we should watch it on film.'”

There would be initial resistance, but curiosity eventually won out, and father and son would begin to methodically, sometimes painfully, go over every snap, every step.

“Those were the times that I thought it was too much,” Angie said. “Because they would work out together. Then he’d go to school. Then they’d practice together. Then they’d come home and watch film together.

“And maybe there were times when I thought: ‘This is just — maybe it was overboard.’ But Carl would always say, ‘As long as Trey is willing to work with me I’ll do it. And I’ll never give up on it until he tells me to stop.’ And Trey just didn’t.”

By the time he was a high school sophomore, Trey didn’t need to be coaxed to go over film. Like getting up for 5 a.m. workouts, it was part of his routine. It’s what helped him get off to such a fast start at North Dakota State. His predecessor at quarterback, Easton Stick, remembered Lance coming in for a handful of snaps as a true freshman in 2018.

“Even for an 18-year-old kid, he was big, strong, powerful.” said Stick, now with the Chargers. “The way he was able to interact with guys and get up to speed pretty quickly with what we were doing offensively — it was impressive. It was pretty easy to recognize and a sign of things to come for him.”

The next year, he took over the Bisons’ demanding, pro-style offense, barking audibles out of plays, calling out protections and going all season without throwing an interception. Behind Lance, they went 16-0 and won the FCS championship.

As Kyle Shanahan noted last week, the 49ers installed their entire offense during OTAs. The challenge for rookies like Lance isn’t just how much they retain but whether they can start to make the playbook second nature when the true roster battles begin.

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But if the past is indicative of the future, Trey should be well prepared by holding onto the lessons learned in those predawn YMCA sessions. After all, he’s a No. 3 overall pick who was raised to think like a small-school, undrafted free agent and who sweats his hardest while the other guy is still sleeping.

“I’ve always told him: You’ve got to outwork people,” Carlton said. “And you’ve got to take pride in it. I think he’s probably coming into the 49ers with the mindset of, ‘Hey, I’ve got to grind for this.’ Well, I know that’s his mindset. That’s what he’s doing.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Top photo of Trey Lance: Michael Zagaris / Getty Images; other photos courtesy of the Lance family)