Fast-forward to late July, where everyone who took the July ACT anxiously await their scores. I really hope that all that studying from Memorial Day until mid-July have borne their fruits, Pablo starts thinking while he receives a notification from the ACT at work.
However, because he's busy looking for brake pads for a customer at work, he can't act upon the notification right away. Looks like that customer bought the same brakes I bought Audrey last season! He starts thinking about Audrey while carrying the brakes the customer ordered to the counter.
"Here" Pablo tells the customer before scanning the brakes' barcodes and telling the total amount to pay.
The customer hurries in tapping the credit card, and then packs up and leaves. But then Pablo will need to wait patiently for the moment where he can take a break, if possible, or just wait out the end of his shift otherwise. Yet he can't shake the feeling that it might not be mere coincidence that the ACT notified him while he was serving a customer the same brakes he bought Audrey for Christmas.
However, once his shift ends, the first thing he does after the shop closes is to check on his ACT score. He crosses his fingers after logging in onto his account, but it's only then that he realizes that he's going to be a little nervous because of his mobile connection.
If I did well on this July date, which Audrey suggested to me because it was less crowded, then I should have one less thing to worry about. I already have enough stresses, but that I kept hidden for a while, especially with the football season coming up, Pablo starts feeling the weight of the expectations placed on him for junior year. This better be good: I didn't take to practice questions daily for months for nothing!
Thirty-four. That was a lot for him, and certainly for VA footballers, but he knew that, compared to past VA quiz bowlers at the HSNCT, it was barely average. He then texts Audrey about that 34 on the ACT, and asking her to check on her ACT score at the earliest opportunity.
"Congrats Pablo!" Audrey replies to him.
"What about you?"
"Thirty-five"
Pablo then reacts with a heart emoji to Audrey's 35 on the ACT, before leaving her be.
Cora and Susan should tell me these along any second now. However, I understand if they aren't in the mood for that though, Audrey muses while she asks these two about their ACT scores by texting. I might have been the brainiac of the basketball teams for so long, but I have the impression that Cora might be smarter than even Heather. After all, she asked for my help academically the least last season.
At the same time, Pablo receives the link to a YouTube clip of Finn's biggest hits in his high school football career for the VAs. With his academics the way they are, I feel like Finn might be good enough to play in community college, but that's about it. By now I feel like he must have sent this clip to either community colleges or Division 2-3 colleges. Because, unfortunately, Division 1 is not academically feasible for him, and probably not athletically feasible either.
This clip is a wake-up call for him, and he scrambles to ask his teammates whether they kept any clips from his best football last season. Or his parents even, upon returning home.
"Why do you want to assemble a clip of your best plays from last season?" Pablo's dad asks him upon returning home. "The coach told you about how you shouldn't bank on using football to attend college!"
"Yes, my reasons are football-related, but even if I was unable to play football in college, I still want some memento of my time playing it as a VA!" Pablo explains himself.
"By now you know that a lot of ex-high school football players look back fondly on their playing days so long as they actually played relatively well, and don't suffer career-ending injuries because of football" Pablo's dad explains to him before bringing him to the computer where he stores gameplay footage from various VA football games Pablo started.
"Now, post-pandemic, this place seemed to put more emphasis on the highlights of academic teams, such as quiz bowl, and how my own HSNCT run could supplement these football memories!"
"I know we're overdue to make this showcase, but next season we should do it at the end of the season, and hopefully, with clips from one or more playoff games!" Pablo's dad then takes him to watch footage from last season's games.
Clearly a seasonal highlight reel was the first step. But as he watches tapes from the season, he knows that his lack of consistency on the field has haunted him. And yet, it appears up to his dad to pick what are deemed the best plays of the season.
"This highlight reel appears a little heavy on clips from the Washington-Marion and South Beauregard games. Games late in the season. Is that normal?" Pablo asks his father.
"Yes!" his father answers him while the highlight reel is being compiled. "However, for a lot of players who show flashes of brilliance as football players, playoff games bring out the best in them, provided their teams make it"
"And yet, I was told that I would have needed to play more consistently to actually play in college, even if that meant Division three or community college!"
"I kept hearing from other parents of players on rival teams that, if your highlight reel is decent enough, you should then send out clips with recruiting questionnaires, across divisions. But Division III? If you're going to play in DIII, you may as well try your hand at the Ivy League; it would make no financial difference whether you are recruited or not!" Pablo's dad harangues his son.
"Ivy League... Audrey and especially Heather made me feel like the Ivy League was one of the worst Division I conferences on an athletic level because of their lack of athletic scholarships and the stringent academic standards! And Heather sent her own highlight reels to all eight!"
In football and basketball anyway. The gap is smaller in other sports. These days, I interact with Heather mostly in the weight room, Pablo holds himself back from talking about the specifics.
"Heather? She thinks that, because she had a breakout AAU season, and a good ACT score, playing as a walk-on in the Ivy League has somehow become realistic?" Pablo's mom gasps upon overhearing the two as they assemble a highlight reel.
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"Don't forget: there's nothing wrong with attending a non-elite college! Your older brother happily attended LSU, you should consider attending if you can't get offers..." Pablo's dad sermons him again, while he uploads the reel using Pablo's YouTube account.
"No way I am going to walk on at LSU! Playing for the Tigers requires, like, being one of the best football players across the state! As much as I might have some football talent, like Audrey in basketball, I am a marginal Division III prospect at best!"
"Now that you have all the key items in place, please fill out recruiting questionnaires of colleges that you might want to attend without having to rely on football!"
"Dad, I have no clue of where I might even want to go to college, beyond, like, WUSTL or UChicago, or even Tulane or the Ivies! There's a whole world of possibilities I know next to nothing about!" Pablo keeps whining.
Oops. Audrey acted as if the WUSTL Bears or the UChicago Maroon had an interest in her. I may as well send tapes there, too! Pablo muses while he looks for the Ivy League schools' football questionnaires. And, of course, Tulane, UChicago and WUSTL.
When the first questionnaire lands on his hands, he wonders if there's a service that can pre-fill the questions common to everyone, like the identity, parents' contact information, the link to their showcase video, and the prospect's measurables. On which he never obsessed at any point in his football career.
"Damn it! I never had an actual measure of bench press or squat! I am in the dark about the forty-yard dash as well! I guess, not obsessing over stats helped me reduce my football-related stresses, but..." Pablo then yelps, before asking a favor to his teammates by text. "Tomorrow, we're going to bench press, squat, do 40s, and any other measurables as deemed necessary!"
Just because the whole football culture of VA emphasizes team results over individual stats, and that it's made clear on day one that what makes players great can't always be measured, doesn't mean stats don't matter! Dayton muses upon reading Pablo's tentative plan for the first stage of next day's practice. Maybe Pablo believed these measurables, especially bench press and squat, and to a lesser extent the 40, can change so much over just a few months...
And, because Pablo's dad just gave Pablo some hope that he could actually keep playing his sport in college, he's left wondering what kind of measurables are expected at his position for the level of play.
"Keep in mind that the odds are already long enough to even play football in college, even as a walk-on, and most NFL players tend to come from the Power-Four conferences. Not only that, you virtually need to earn All-Conference honors at least once, so I urge you, and same goes of your friends, to prioritize academic factors when looking for colleges for whom to play!" Pablo's dad warns his son.
It's obvious that Pablo isn't nearly as good as the Etienne brothers were as football players. Travis and Trevor were the greatest running backs to don a VA, erm, Bulldogs jersey, and yet, Trevor's final season was one where the Bulldogs were nothing without him, Pablo's dad starts revisiting past football players.
"One last thing: you might want to look at other tight end showcases of recent recruits at various levels of colleges, to see what to expect from each level of college, and preferably from the same conferences as the schools you are interested in"
"Yes, dad... And scouting reports, too!"
But while he watches tapes from tight end recruits in conferences such as the American (or AAC), the Ivy and Patriot Leagues, and the CAA on a Division 1 level, he realizes that tapes are much harder to find for Division 3 recruits. It seems like most of the tapes available from Division 3 recruits are playing for schools like, you know, Carnegie Mellon or other colleges at that level of selectivity. I could almost consider CMU as a D2 college but without athletic scholarships.
The following morning, when Pablo shows up to practice, a few of the attendees ask him about why they getting the drill done on the track rather than on the field.
"Although the odds are long that any of us will play in college, and stacked against us, measurables are part of the deal. However, it's not the end of the story!" Pablo explains to his teammates.
"Consider today's time on the forty a preseason benchmark to work from!" Finn advises the other players.
"We will then have us run forty-yard dashes in eight-player heats!" Valter, who also runs on the track team, positions himself, starter gun in hand, with Pablo in the first heat.
And then Ethan, Malcolm, Finn, Dayton, Orson, Heath and George will all run on the same heat alongside him, all positioned on the 40-yard line. As Valter fires the starter gun, these eight are off running for maybe five seconds in a blur, give or take a few fractions of a second.
Unsurprisingly, since they are the biggest players, Dayton and Finn are the slowest two, with George being one-tenth of a second faster. Yet Pablo ran that 40 in five seconds flat. Malcolm and Ethan being faster, Pablo finished third.
Before the second heat begins, with Valter, Bart and other football players taking up positions by the 40-yard line, Finn asks him a question:
"Since you asked to have our forties timed, what about you fire the starter gun for the second heat?" Finn asks sarcastically.
"I guess, I have no choice!" Pablo then turns to Valter. "Is there anything special about operating a starter gun?"
"Other than the starter gun not being able to fire any kind of ammo, not really" Valter answers his teammate before handing off the starter gun to him.
And Valter gets into position. As Pablo fires the starter gun, Valter proves to be the fastest player in the second heat, since he scores the only sub-5s 40 in that heat.
Now that they have finished recording their times on the 40, they put the timing equipment away and then move into the weight room for the bench press and the squat. With the players on the first heat going to bench press and the second heat going to squat instead.
Once everyone is done with the bench press and the squat, the players then come together and note these... pre-season benchmarks down on their phones.
"I guess, Pablo made us take these conditioning measurements so we may as well do more strength and conditioning practice!" Finn exclaims while the other players fan out to exercise machines.
And then the players appear to be playing a game of musical chairs with the exercise machines since their strength and conditioning regimen mean that they are not doing the same exercises, nor with the same number of reps. And, of course, other users, too.
Once that game of musical chairs ends, and everyone has showered, he comes across Audrey, who was practicing her passing game with Carrie and Cora. However, Heather is noticeably absent.
"Audrey, did you start sending out tapes yet?" Pablo asks Audrey. "You know, these attachments to recruiting questionnaires colleges always ask for?"
"Yes, as soon as I had my ACT score in hand" Audrey answers him.
"I'm about to send tapes, dad made me compile a highlight reel last night! And made me feel like I can play in college!"
"Why did it take you so long to send them? WUSTL and UChicago already asked for my questionnaires!"
"I needed to gather my pre-season measurables, the forty, bench press and squat, before I could send them!"
"Also, Heather seems a little deranged lately; while she has improved some during the time where I wasn't on the court, rather than to try to get me to play in the Ivy League, she feels like that conference is the only way for her to play any kind of Division I hoops! Now, watch the summer version of my highlight reel!" Audrey then opens her phone while Pablo is finalizing his own recruiting questionnaire.
Or, more specifically, the common portion of the questionnaire, which feels like an abridged version of the Common Application. Which he then sends out to dozens of colleges, just not Power-4 football programs. Now that's an improvement in defense and in passing! Pablo keeps quiet as he watches the new version of Audrey's highlight reel.
"With Heather's academic stats, the required level of hoops talent to even sniff the Ivy League would mean that she may as well play for Georgetown, Berkeley, Stanford, Duke or Notre Dame! You know Ivy League athletic recruiting operates on a sliding scale: each decrease in academics must be compensated by an increase in athletic talent!"
"This is nothing new to me..." Pablo sighs, while he starts answering supplemental questions for some colleges.