With the advances in technology, High School football players have ways of getting more exposure than ever before. Players put highlight reels up on YouTube and Hudl, and email links out to coaches as much as possible.
Dominion High School (Sterling, VA) senior tight end and linebacker Rich Tran decided to have some fun with it and created a senior-year highlight tape named the “Best Highlight Reel Ever.”
Tran told the Washington Post that he had fun with it and:
Tran said the idea came to him while he and a few classmates were watching other football highlight videos. But as a backup linebacker whose prime responsibilities were on kick coverage and returns, finding enough plays to compile a full video “wasn’t as easy as people think,” Tran said.
“I spent a lot more time working on it than it looks,” he said. “Roughly an hour, I’d say. And actually, I made another video first, but I accidentally exited out of it before saving, so I had to do it again. So maybe two hours total.”
The video is filled with him blocking, missing tackles, standing on the sideline and running routes on plays where the ball is never thrown to him. Not everyone can have a college or pro football career, but you have to give this kid major credit for continuing to show up to practices and games and working hard whenever he was given the chance.
Tran said he e-mailed the video to Denver Post columnist and ESPN’s “Around the Horn” regular Woody Paige as well as ESPN’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning” show. As of Tuesday, he was still waiting to hear back. He also looked up contact info for the University of Alabama’s athletic director in the hopes that it might somehow end up on Nick Saban’s computer screen.
Maybe he’ll get lucky and get some face time on ESPN.
[Washington Post]