KENOSHA, Wis. -- When Trae Waynes was practing football in the yard, the whole neighborhood knew it. Instead of a cushioned tackling dummy, Trae and his father, Ron, worked with trash cans.
"Plastic ones," recalled neighbor Tim Millard. "His dad would be holding it, and he'd be hitting it."
The family eventually got a cushioned tackling dummy for their aspiring football player. Before that, a decade ago, they improvised.
The Minnesota Vikings' top pick in the May NFL Draft has come a long way since then, but it was in Kenosha -- a city of about 100,000 people 40 miles south of Milwaukee on Lake Michigan -- where Waynes, 23, got his start.