Before you accuse ol’ SwampSwami of becoming another “fake news”purveyor, the young man mentioned in the headline is actually starting the seventh grade in school this month.
Truth: Grambling State University has offered a 12-year old young man a college baseball scholarship after watching him perform during the summer.
How hard-up are the Tigers from northwest Louisiana to field a better ball team? This year’s Grambling baseball squad posted a decent 26-26 record in 2018 with a 14-10 conference record.
So, who is this young baseball phenom, and why would a college offer a scholarship to him a half-dozen years before he graduates from high school?
This talented young lad is named Elijiah Barney from Gulfport, Mississippi. He has a lineage which indicates that he might, perhaps, have a better than average chance of becoming a good college athlete – in about six years, that is.
If you are old enough to remember a certain NFL Hall-of-Fame cornerback and special teams standout for the Detroit Lions by the name of Lem Barney, he is also the great uncle of our 12-year old baseball whiz. Lem Barney played his college football for Jackson State University in Mississippi and became a second round draft pick of the Lions – at age 22.
Fortunately for Lem, he had the chance to be a kid and grow into a young adult while outside of the major media spotlight.
Unfortunately for today’s kids, it is becoming more and more common for college coaches of all major sports to spend time scouting younger and younger athletes in hopes of improving the school’s chances of winning more games. The 24/7 media isn’t helping this absurd new trend, either.
Just this summer, the 13-year old son of current NBA star LeBron James was being highlighted by the national sports media as a rising basketball star. Watch him run the court and dunk the ball. Wow – another phenom in the making!
Perhaps, but LeBron’s son has another five years of junior high and high school to complete. But he IS the son of LeBron James, right?
Good grief.
I remember that golf’s greatest major champion, Jack Nicklaus, had a couple of golf-playing sons, too. One of them, Gary Nicklaus, had a nice run of success as an amateur and, like his famous Dad, became an All-American at Ohio State University. While the younger Nicklaus tried for several years to make it on the PGA Tour on his own, Gary, now 49, does other work for a living today and has happily regained his amateur golf status again just for the fun of it.
With the cost of college so high, the parents of young athletes are quite aware of the possible financial pot of gold at the end of the youth sports rainbow. Even girls sports such as softball will have college scouts looking for future stars prior to these kids even entering high school.
As one or more colleges dangle the hook of an expensive college scholarship, some parents will do nearly anything they can to help their talented child find and grab the right hook.
How many of us were sports world-beaters (in our own minds) in the sixth, seventh, or eighth grades? A lot.
And how many actually made it to playing college ball by the time high school ended? Very very few.
I hope the same media will be around in six years to document how well Grambling’s then-18 year old signee fares as a college baseball player.
Unless, of course, he is drafted in the first round by Major League Baseball instead!
Yeah, that would be great!