Jim Reese, who has been writing for both CompuSports and Florida newspapers for ten years, recently published a book entitled, “Sports Stories-Old School.”

Jim, a former quarterback at the University of Minnesota and a past high school and college coach, reminisces about the times and people he has met in a fifty-five year journey through sporting fields, locker rooms and lives, ranging from his relationship with Vince Lombardi, to an unheralded second-stringer on a losing high school football team who was determined to play college football.

Jim’s book Sports Stories-Old School is available now in eBook and paperback format. His past articles can be found under the Inside the Hash Marks category, and his ebook How to Win at Flag Football is available here.

Below is one of the stories from his new book.

The Kid Nobody Wanted
Jim Reese

My assignment with the newspaper was to contact some local high school football coaches and ask them about any players who might be getting financial aid to go to college. I was to ask not about the blue chippers that the Miami’s and Michigan’s and Florida’s were coming after, but rather about the kids that no one really wanted, and how they, as coaches, helped those boys.

One coach told me the following story.

“Back in 1998, we had a kid on our team who was small but had a great deal of determination and enthusiasm. He wanted to go to college and get an education so he could leave behind the dirt-poor existence he had known all his life. He was one of eight people sharing a small two-bedroom house with his mother and brothers and sisters in a back woods section of rural Florida. His bedroom was a small section of the living room where he kept everything he had, which wasn’t much.

He wasn’t a real good student but he got B’s and C’s. He always wore the same clothes. From time to time, I would give him some t-shirts but then I wouldn’t see the boy wearing them anymore. When I asked why, he said his older brothers always took them away from him. He went out for football and was a 5-8, 170 pound running back. He told me he needed help if he was going to go to college so I got him a job helping the custodians clean the school at night. After practice, we would give him bologna sandwiches from the cafeteria before he went to work.

Working long and hard, the boy saved $4,000. He would stash it in a safe place because he knew his brothers would steal it from him if he brought it home.

Every year, there are recruiting nights where the smaller colleges come to the talent rich Florida high schools to see who is left. That year, I tried very hard to sell the boy to the coaches but there weren’t any takers. ‘He’s too small, he won’t be able to play with us,’ was the usual comment. That’s when he walked right up to a coach from a small college in Michigan. He looked the coach right in the eye and said, ‘I have saved $4,000 working as a janitor. You can take it with you back to your school if you’ll just help me get to your college. I promise you won’t be sorry.’ The college coach looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know, coach. He’s awful small.’ I said to the coach, ‘He’s right. You won’t be sorry.’

The school took a chance on him and put together a financial package and the boy went off to Michigan. He never returned home all the time he was in college. He was red-shirted his freshman year and by the time he graduated, he finished just 100 yards shy of breaking the school’s career rushing record. In his fifth year of college, he wanted to enroll in the School of Engineering because that had been his dream. Again, there was doubt as to whether he could do the work.

But he got in.

A year later, he graduated with a degree in engineering.

He applied for a position with a prestigious engineering firm in Indianapolis and was hired. He and his wife now have a baby boy.

And he vows that he and they will never live the hard-scrabble existence he knew growing up.

On Homecoming Night in his final year, my wife and I flew up to Michigan and were honored to act as his escorts when the young man proudly walked to the fifty-yard line to receive the handshake of the president of the university.”

(Ed Note: I went on the Internet the other night and found a video clip of the young man scoring a touchdown on a 70-yard run for his college team. At the end of the run, there were no goofy dances or demonstrations. The boy accepted the handshakes of his fellow players and simply jogged back to his team’s bench. Young athletes everywhere would do well to emulate this young man, both on and off the field.)