One Step at a time

Practicing every day. Coaches riding you. Sacrificing your body for the team, day in and day out while trying to keep up in the classroom. It’s not easy, even in the off-season.

Now imagine going through all this without any guarantee of playing time, no gratitude and absolutely no glory.

Welcome to the life of a walk-on. An un-recruited, non-scholarship player who wants to prove that they’re good enough to be on the team.

Every team needs some, but they don’t need anyone specific – just a warm body for practice. And sometimes it can show in the way coaches and some teammates treat the walk-ons.

“The players really don’t treat you any differently; it’s the coaches,” football walk-on Eric Sobolewski said. “It almost feels like you have to prove to them every day – day in day out – that you can do this at this level and compete every day.”

Sobolewski said he wanted to walk-on at USU because he thought he would have more of a chance to get playing time. However, it hasn’t been all fun and games. For many walk-ons, including Sobolewski, playing the sport they love is difficult financially. They spend a lot of time a practice and school, so they don’t have much time left over to work.

He said it can be hard when he feels like everything is going well but when game time comes he finds out he isn’t going to be able to travel with the team. But he said the best thing about being a walk-on is that he simply gets to live his dream and play football.

According to Utah State basketball walk-on Humphrey Jackson, it’s worth it.

“It’s fun to put in all that hard work,” he said. “I want to make them give me that scholarship.”

Jackson said he didn’t have to worry about getting playing time this season because he was a red-shirt, meaning the team said he wouldn’t play so he wouldn’t lose a year of eligibility.

He said he could have played elsewhere, but he chose to a walk on to USU instead.

“I had some opportunities to play Division-II,” he said. “Scholarships are hard to come by. I had some connections here. I really didn’t have to try out. They just had me come play with the team.”

USU assistant football coach Greg Stevens said some players are invited to come walk-on and there are tryouts for everyone else. He said NCAA regulations prohibit the team from using any football equipment at the tryouts.

“They’re not real intense,” Stevens said. “I don’t know why we can’t use equipment. I don’t know why the NCAA does a lot of the things it does.”

Stevens said it is still easy to weed out the players that don’t belong.

“There’s some guys that never played football that think they can play college,” he said.

Every year will normally produce at least one quality walk-on, Stevens said. Last year, that player was Jake Hutton for the football team.

Hutton was the Defensive Player of the Year in his senior year in high school in Idaho, but he said he was not recruited by anyone. So in order to continue playing, he had to walk on to the Aggie football squad.

As a walk-on, Hutton led the Aggies with 87 tackles last season.

He said that when he arrived, he hoped he would get a scholarship, but never expected it to happen.

“If I didn’t think I could, then it wouldn’t have come,” he said. “But I wasn’t expecting this.”

Hutton said no one looked down on him for being a walk-on last season because there was a new coach and new system that everyone had to get used to.

“Everyone had to learn the same defense,” he said. “We were all at the same level. No one had a step up.”

Stevens said different coaches treat walk-ons differently. Head football coach Brent Guy was a walk-on himself in college, so he treats them the same as the scholarship players, Stevens said.

“He usually puts four guys on scholarship (that were walk-ons) every year,” he said. “We encourage guys to walk on. We give them every opportunity to show us what they got.”

That was the experience that junior football player Chris James had as a walk-on.

“If anything, I think they comforted me more because I was a walk-on,” James said. “They tried to make me feel just as important as scholarship guys. It’s pretty fair.”

But, he said, it is hard when he has to find time to get money and fit school work in around football practices. He said there really isn’t anything too hard about being a walk-on, but he said it can get tough sometimes.

Ashley Rutledge, walk-on turned scholarship player for the basketball team, said being a walk-on requires a huge mental as well as physical committment.

“It’s an entirely different mentality for a walk-on athlete,” she said. “You have to do everything better to just stick out. A walk-on athlete just needs to have more dedication and also needs to understand the huge committment required to be a Division-I athlete.”

Although she had to think a little differently than the scholarship players, Rutledge said she wasn’t treated any differently at practice.

She said her teammates were her best friends and her coach held her to the same expectations as the scholarship players.

Jackson said that on the basketball team, no one treats him any worse than the rest of the players.

“Not from the players and not from the coaches,” he said. “I’m part of the team.”

With that being said, Jackson said he doesn’t have much room for error in practice.

“There’s not much lee-way,” he said. “I can’t mess up, but mistakes happen. You’ve got to learn from your mistake and you can’t think about it.”

Even if he knew he wouldn’t get a scholarship, Jackson said he would still stay at USU.

“These are the best fans in the country,” he said. “It would be hard to leave.”

-bhhinton@cc.usu.edu

Andrea Edmunds, Seth Hawkins and Morgan Russell also contributed to this story.