Players hope to get noticed at summer football camps

Let’s go camping.To hear those words, most men, young and old, think of summer camps with the Boys Scouts or roughing it with the family — complete with mosquitoes, ticks, sunburns, latrines and ultimately a good time.Yet for a growing number of young men, summer camp has come to mean one thing — football camp! For the majority of gridiron camp participants, there's more to the camp experience than a week of fun scrimmages and practice drills. For many campers, there's an alternative agenda — showcasing their talent in the hopes of receiving a college football scholarship.Brigham Young University has offered a summer football camp since the 1970's. This year, BYU's two camps were held in the latter part of June. Scholarship hunting at summer camps can be expensive, with many of these young men attending more than one camp in hopes of catching a coach's eye. Many programs won’t make a scholarship offer until they see the prospect at their camps due to NCAA restrictions on the amount of contact with high school athletes.Some athletes attend only one or two days of a camp, just long enough to get that important exposure to the coaches who will be making those scholarship decisions. One afternoon, on the last day of the first week of BYU's football camp, I ventured out to see how one of these camps actually performed. The only individuals that were available to talk with me were some injured players and some parents of some of the athletes. These individuals walked the sidelines while the other athletes received football instruction — some in pass-catching instruction. I spoke with one parent who was there with his son, his son’s two high school teammates and his nephew. His name was Setaleki Pohahau and he had traveled to BYU with these four young men from the Tennison school system in Heywood, California. Pohahau is a father of eight children — four boys, four girls. His son, Setaleki Pohahau Jr, is a 5-foot-9, 165-pound sophomore who will play varsity football this fall as a running back. According to his father, Junior ran a 4.7 40 and had a 29-inch vertical in camp testing. Of all his children, Setaleki said that this son was the most interested in sports and was very dedicated to his class studies (he has a 3.5 GPA). Junior told his father that after hearing former BYU and Philadelphia Eagles player Chad Lewis speak on the topic of "excellence in all things," his son said he wants to work harder in the classroom and bring his GPA up to a 4.0. According to his father, his son would love to play one day for BYU, and he's been working hard this week in camp to earn a chance. This was not their first camp. They had also attended the Cal Berkley camp and the Polynesian Camp held in Salt Lake City earlier in June. The Cal camp was a huge affair with about 800 athletes attending. The Polynesian Camp was similar in size to BYU’s. The difference of the BYU camp to these other two camps was that the other two camps were full contact. The BYU camp was structured after the regular preseason training and was without pads. Several of the ailing young men on the sidelines pointed out that they had sustained their injuries prior to coming to BYU’s camp after participating in these full-contact camps. Setaleki Sr. said he liked the BYU camp better than the other two because it was more based on instruction and training in proper techniques. He was very interested in learning effective ways to personally train his son and his nephew, Aisea Ramirez, who will be a freshman lineman this fall and who is already 6-foot and 240 pounds. Setaleki said the doctors have told his nephew that he’s on track to grow to be about 6-6. According to Setaleki Sr, coach Bronco Mendenhall spent most of his time observing the players. Mendenhall's staff though was working with each young man and on some of the catching drills that I observed, as many as two coaches would converge on a player after he had run his route or defended a pass and explain what they had done right or wrong. There was a lot of direct coaching and teaching going on. Both Setaleki Jr and Aisea are LDS. The two friends they brought from their Tennison High School were not LDS, but were really enjoying the camp experience. One was a sophomore wide receiver, Martin Marquez, and the other a freshman defensive back, Chase Martinez, Jr. Football practice back at Tennison High School had already commenced for the four players, but they all had been given coach's permission to attend this camp. I met a few other individuals on the sidelines. One injured young man — the injury was sustained from the Poly Camp he had attended the week before — had a last name familiar to BYU football fans: Mahe. John Mahe is a 6-1, 205-pound linebacker/tight end from Salt Lake City who will be a senior this season. He told me he had already attended the Poly Camp, as well as camps at Weber State, Utah State and the University of Utah. I asked him how he could afford so many camps. He said his uncle, Reno Mahe, who played for the Philadelphia Eagles last season, was helping him with the costs. John said he met another relative of a great BYU player from the past, a nephew of the famed Lakei Hemuli and pointed him out to me as he was out on the field participating in the pass catching and defending drills. For many of the hundreds of youth that spent their week at this camp or others, the dreams of playing for such great Division-1 programs will remain just a dream as the competition is fierce, with many vying for few scholarship offers.Maybe someday, all Cougar fans will know the names of Setaleki Pahahau Jr. or John Mahe as they don the Cougar blue and realize their dreams of playing for a fabled football program. But for this week, they were just one of many hoping to be noticed.

Jim Vallen
COUGARBLUE