Do guys do this????

My dad grew up in NYC where it was standard practice for the top of the class to skip one grade in elementary school and one grade in middle school. He was a pretty good baseball player, but was two years in development behind other high schoolers, giving him no real shot. He loved watching my brother play high school baseball and you could tell he regretted never being able to play himself.
 
I was an average cross-country runner my senior year in high school, without really trying very hard at it. That was the only year I ran. But I went to a rural high school where football was king and so our cross-country team was small. We didn't even have a real coach. We had the basketball coach who would show up and tell us to go run 3 miles and then tell him how long it took when we were done. Meanwhile he'd sit on his *** and watch the football team practice. We did no intervals, no strength training, no speedwork, etc...

We really didn't know what the hell we were doing. But when it came to running three miles there were probably only a small handful of guys in my school that were faster than me. I think my fastest time back then was an 18:40-something for a 5K. Certainly not fast enough to run in college. Not even close.

Today I'm 35 and I take my running a lot more seriously than I did back then. I know how to train properly for different distances and I know how to peak for a race. At 35, with a lot of work, I can run faster than I did as an 18 year old.

So yes, I sometimes think about how fast I could have gotten if I had dedicated 4 years to quality training and higher mileage. Probably still wouldn't have been fast enough to run in college, but it wold have been nice to have achieved my potential, whatever it was.
 
When it came to pure athletiscm I lived vicariously through my younger brother.

In 8th grade, his middle school coach asked his gym class if anyone wanted to run in the district cross country event. My brother said 'sure', but because my brother had never run before - the coach placed him in the non-competitive division. My brother blew everyone away. He ran 5k in less than 16 minutes... which would have put him in the top 2 of the competitive division. He said he would have pushed himself harder if there were actually people running at his pace.

The track coach walked up to us after the race and asked my brother why he didn't tell him he was that fast. My brother said, "Well, you didn't ask and I've never run a race before."

The coach just sat there with a blank look in his face.

The coaches at his high school knew he had speed... and so they asked him to join the team time and time again. My brother just shrugged them off. He was just bored by the idea of running...
 
llano, 70 at 12 yrs old? that's sick. that's the equivalent of a 98 mph pitch at 60 feet. i think. do u throw any faster now?
 
I was a very marginal athlete. I had fun and gave it all I had and never had one thought about receiving an athletic scholarship. So to answer your question, no.
 
I know that my HS football coach purposefully screwed me out of opportunities, and I still think about it.

One day, after jumping offside twice in practice - he had me demoted to JV as a Jr (even though I was the second best WR we had, so I went from starting on Varsity to starting on JV).

He held my Academic All-American scholarship application until 3 days after it was due.

He wouldn't give me any film to send to the few schools that actually asked me for them (because he never responded to them).

Even when I decided to walk on at UT, he "remembered" my stats much differently in the letter he wrote to the team (cut my yards in half, fewer TDs, etc...)

Yes, guys do that. Yes, I could have played. What the **** if.
 
I was already a student at UT when I was recruited. And definitely, leg/back strength is more important than height. But they were recruiting walk-ons for the team, and I was actually walking down Speedway in front of Gregory when I guy stopped me and asked how tall I was and if I was interested in trying out for the team. So I think when you are recruiting off the street, height is all you have to go on initially.
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