over eighty scholarship offers from schools across the country. When I started high school, I was simply hoping for one. It was a very humbling as well as heady experience.
One school seemed to have had an advantage initially for me, and it made for another great story line during our high school football seasons: Alabama, because of its fans.
Seriously. The University of Alabama fans. Honest to goodness, they used to come to our games en masse at Nease High School in their red and white Roll Tide gear, holding up home-made signs for me, encouraging me to head to ’Bama. I’d always liked the idea of a Southern school, not to mention one that was football crazy. It was very effective on this young and impressionable player.
And it needed to be effective, since I grew up in a room decorated in Florida Gator stuff. Orange and blue colors in all sorts of things and outfits had been decorating the walls, tables, and closets around our home for as long as I could remember. Of course, it was only natural that I would grow up with Gator stuff, since both my parents and my older sister Katie attended the University of Florida. And by my sophomore year of high school, Peter was already in Gainesville and enrolled in school there as a freshman. Three graduates of the University of Florida and another on his way, all in one family.
Given that background, you’d think that this would be the easiest decision in the world, but in truth I was pretty open-minded about schools, if only because I was such a big college-football fan in general. I’d grown up watching just about every game I could on Saturdays—that is, when Dad didn’t make us work around the farm. So I was very receptive to considering other options besides Florida.
My sister Katie claims that she did more to overcome that openness of mine and recruit me to Florida than anyone else. At her wedding, when I was fifteen, she recalls that I was very impressed with how pretty and nice her bridesmaids were. Apparently I also took notice of the fact that they were all classmates of hers during her college career at Florida. In fact, I’d remembered some of those bridesmaids from a couple of years earlier when I’d had a baseball game in Gainesville. For some reason, my parents were busy, so my friend’s dad drove me and him to Gainesville and dropped us off at ADPi, my sister’s sorority. There we were, two twelve-year-old kids hanging out; then my sister and two of her friends, Brooke and Stephie, took us to our game. We struggled to pay attention to the game, especially my friend, who kept going over to talk with the girls, hoping that those college girls would fall for a twelve-year-old. No such luck.
Later, along the way, I at least tried to justify my decision as to which college I would ultimately attend with more principled reasons than simply recruiting letters, fan or family apparel, or gorgeous bridesmaids.
During my sophomore year, my parents and I had begun making unofficial visits to schools and continued those visits throughout the rest of my high school career. If we felt a particular visit would be helpful to my decision-making process, then we made the trip. Although you only get five “official” visits, where the school pays for your trip, you can take an unlimited number of unofficial visits on your own dime. Thankfully, my parents were willing to take the time and underwrite the expense to allow us to do that. On occasion, when for one reason or another my parents couldn’t go, different people—usually my brothers or my friends—would accompany me on trips. It was great since it was a chance to see great college football and some great educational institutions up close.
One unlikely trip we made was to see the University of Virginia play at Florida State. I say unlikely since I had never been a particularly passionate supporter of FSU, to put it nicely. When I came of age as a Gator fan, FSU was the program that we seemed to be having the
One school seemed to have had an advantage initially for me, and it made for another great story line during our high school football seasons: Alabama, because of its fans.
Seriously. The University of Alabama fans. Honest to goodness, they used to come to our games en masse at Nease High School in their red and white Roll Tide gear, holding up home-made signs for me, encouraging me to head to ’Bama. I’d always liked the idea of a Southern school, not to mention one that was football crazy. It was very effective on this young and impressionable player.
And it needed to be effective, since I grew up in a room decorated in Florida Gator stuff. Orange and blue colors in all sorts of things and outfits had been decorating the walls, tables, and closets around our home for as long as I could remember. Of course, it was only natural that I would grow up with Gator stuff, since both my parents and my older sister Katie attended the University of Florida. And by my sophomore year of high school, Peter was already in Gainesville and enrolled in school there as a freshman. Three graduates of the University of Florida and another on his way, all in one family.
Given that background, you’d think that this would be the easiest decision in the world, but in truth I was pretty open-minded about schools, if only because I was such a big college-football fan in general. I’d grown up watching just about every game I could on Saturdays—that is, when Dad didn’t make us work around the farm. So I was very receptive to considering other options besides Florida.
My sister Katie claims that she did more to overcome that openness of mine and recruit me to Florida than anyone else. At her wedding, when I was fifteen, she recalls that I was very impressed with how pretty and nice her bridesmaids were. Apparently I also took notice of the fact that they were all classmates of hers during her college career at Florida. In fact, I’d remembered some of those bridesmaids from a couple of years earlier when I’d had a baseball game in Gainesville. For some reason, my parents were busy, so my friend’s dad drove me and him to Gainesville and dropped us off at ADPi, my sister’s sorority. There we were, two twelve-year-old kids hanging out; then my sister and two of her friends, Brooke and Stephie, took us to our game. We struggled to pay attention to the game, especially my friend, who kept going over to talk with the girls, hoping that those college girls would fall for a twelve-year-old. No such luck.
Later, along the way, I at least tried to justify my decision as to which college I would ultimately attend with more principled reasons than simply recruiting letters, fan or family apparel, or gorgeous bridesmaids.
During my sophomore year, my parents and I had begun making unofficial visits to schools and continued those visits throughout the rest of my high school career. If we felt a particular visit would be helpful to my decision-making process, then we made the trip. Although you only get five “official” visits, where the school pays for your trip, you can take an unlimited number of unofficial visits on your own dime. Thankfully, my parents were willing to take the time and underwrite the expense to allow us to do that. On occasion, when for one reason or another my parents couldn’t go, different people—usually my brothers or my friends—would accompany me on trips. It was great since it was a chance to see great college football and some great educational institutions up close.
One unlikely trip we made was to see the University of Virginia play at Florida State. I say unlikely since I had never been a particularly passionate supporter of FSU, to put it nicely. When I came of age as a Gator fan, FSU was the program that we seemed to be having the
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