What It Means to Be a Badger by Justin Doherty

Author:Justin Doherty [Doherty, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triumph Books
Published: 2011-10-10T05:00:00+00:00

Cecil Martin

Fullback

1995–1998

My introduction to football was a flag football league for fourth and fifth graders. Then I did one year of tackle football in sixth grade. It was a weight-restricted league, and I worked really hard to try to make weight. It’s interesting to think about a sixth grader actually putting on a garbage bag and running hills and trying not to eat too much and almost going through a whole wrestler’s dynamic in order to make weight to play football every week. So I did that one year of tackle and I didn’t want to go through that anymore, so I didn’t play tackle football again until high school.

I got to Emerson Township High School and jumped right into football. Everyone did get a chance to make the team, but there was an A team and a B team, so I remember the anxiety of whether I was going to make the B team, whether I was good enough to make the A team. After going through about a week of practice, they split the teams up—one group was the A team the other group was the B team—and I was an instant starter playing both ways. I was punting and doing kickoffs, as well. It was a really great experience. We lost one game our freshman year to a crosstown rival.

Not having played much tackle football, I was definitely behind on some basic fundamentals, but I think that I was a good enough athlete—I had always played sports—that my athleticism allowed me to close the gap between that notion of being behind in comparison to those who had gone to Catholic school or gone to schools where they had played before.

I moved up to varsity as a sophomore to play linebacker and I just did okay. They pulled me back to the sophomore team. I played both ways, I kicked, I punted, I had a ball just playing football. Then I went back up to varsity for the last three games of the season and was a completely different player. Just getting out there and playing the game over that period of four or five games on the sophomore team helped me to get better, and it helped me to show that I could compete with older kids, that I could compete at a higher level. So that moved me into some exposure-driven opportunities where colleges were getting a chance to hear about my potential. I played my junior year as a starter both ways and had a really good year—not a great year, but a really good year. I ended up going to camp at Illinois and Northwestern. I did really well at both of those camps, which increased my opportunity at potentially getting offered a scholarship to go to those schools. I was generating a lot of interest, but no offers.

It really all came down to how I did my senior year. I had a really good senior year but, when I walked off the football field for the last time, I had no scholarship offers.

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