With coach Mendenhall the ruff was eligibility. Making sure I didn’t do something that would cause me to be ineligible. We patched things up right away and never looked back.

Coach Tidwell and I didn’t ever see eye to eye after that. I don’t know what all the deal was.

But now I play softball and go to Padres games.

I remember when you were hurt and couldn’t get on the field and feeling you could definately be contributing if healthy that year.(05)? Any regrets about your decision not to play baseball fulltime? I guess you wouldn’t have met JB’s sister. Were the coaches upset that you weren’t fully committed to the program when you also played baseball? Is that what the riff was about?

Coaches ask is how things are going and their offices conveniently overlook the practice fields. But there is bu supervision.

We would call the plays, BYU’s O and D and if we had questions we would go talk to the coaches about it.

Is there any supervision or reporting back to coaches on who is attending? I know the coaches are not supposed to attend, supervise, or take attendance, but I wondered if there was any informal way they heard about how summer workouts are progressing.

Is there any officiating, or is it more like pick-up ball?

Just curious.

I did have an opportunity to play baseball. After my freshman year of football I played in extended spring training in Peoria, AZ with the San Diego Padres Organization. This put a HUGE riff between Coach Mendenhall, Coach Tidwell and I. While baseball is my first real passion, I felt like I had a great thing going at BYU with football (little did I know I would completely tear my hamstring and miss my Jr Year). After spring training I went back to San Diego for a couple weeks and thought some things through. In the end I felt that my best opportunity to succeed in all areas of life were to go back to BYU, mend the relationship with my coaches and focus on taking football as far as I could.

From what I remember your dad played baseball for BYU. Is that right? I also think I remember you had the same opportunity but chose football. I that correct?

We actually went to the championship game with 2 losses. We lost in the championship without our normal line up. We had a good team though. Most of us played a lot of baseball growing up which made our infield very solid. We also had Jason Beck in the outfield with his cannon and Zach Collie and Dustin Gabriel with their speed.

There is also pressure on defense, because one error is costly. People get down on each other, then the errors mount and you’re in a hole. Poor decisions on base running can run you out of an inning. And if you don’t have a pitcher who can throw strikes you’re done for.

I would bet some of those “older” teams in Provo could still compete with you football jocks; I would also bet that y’all won the league!!!

I can imagine this either making the managers of the place very happy or, in the case of all-you-can-eat meets the BYU Offensive Line, very sad…