Buckeye football mom comes to the rescue on Mother's Day weekend

The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders have created unique challenges for people in all walks of life and that includes athletics. For incoming freshmen football players like Ohio State's Grant Toutant, a major challenge right now is finding ways to stay in shape.

With gyms and public parks closed, social distancing being practiced, and no access to high school facilities, athletes like Toutant must make the most of the resources available to them as they try to avoid falling behind in conditioning before arriving at Ohio State.

Luckily for Toutant, there is a handywoman in the household. Feeling like Grant wasn't getting well balanced lifting sessions in, his mother, Helena, stepped up to the plate on Mother's Day weekend of all weekends.

The Football Mom built, from scratch, a new piece of equipment for her son's makeshift basement weight room.

A lat pull down machine.

"We have a weight bench and a rack and like 300 pounds of weights but he was just like complaining that he can't work his back and that's been bothering him and he said he really needed a lat pull down machine," Helena told BuckeyeGrove.com over the weekend. "So we started looking online and I was just like, 'we're not spending a couple of thousand dollars on a lat pull down machine to stick in our basement and then you're leaving in a couple of months'."

So the alternative was buying all of the lumber and pipes and getting out a miter saw and going to work.

"I woke up to the sound of saws Friday morning," Grant stated. "She got up early and got everything to build it. She spent all day making it. I had been asking for a lat pull down machine, but the ones that can hold heavy weight are really expensive."

So with the power of the internet, Helena quickly did her research. From figuring out what supplies she needed and looking at pictures to help conceptualize her project.

"I kept searching and looking at YouTube and I was just thinking that there had to be somebody out there with like a DIY (do-it-yourself) thing," she continued. "So I was looking at some videos and it was OK what they were doing, but it wasn't anything substantial that was going to be able to hold the amount of weight he would need. I just started looking and somebody on YouTube had a decent design but the whole thing was built with 2x2's and I just thought there's no way (it would hold enough weight) so I started thinking about doing it with 4x4's so that it could counter the weight. At that point I just took a couple of screen shots of a couple different machines and the dimensions of lat pull down machines and just putting a list together of what I thought I needed and off to Home Depot I went."

By Saturday evening, the future Buckeye lineman had a brand new, home-made lat pull down machine in his basement.

While this all might seem unusual to most families, as it turns out, major home improvement projects by mom are a pretty common occurrence in the Toutant household. If something needs refinished or constructed, it is often times Helena who steps up to the plate.

"We've been working on finishing our basement (the third basement they've owned that she says she has finished) and I'm also tearing up our old staircase," she said. "I've always been pretty handy. My dad worked three jobs growing up so it was always me and my mom working on projects around the house together. She passed away my senior year of high school but she taught me so much."

Going above and beyond is what we've come to expect from mothers and staying true to that mindset, Toutant gave exactly the type of answer we've grown accustomed to when she was asked about sacrificing the bulk of her Mother's Day weekend to help make her son's life just a little bit better.

"I'm only a mom because of my kids. I live for my kids and I do everything I can for them."