Coleman Edmond watched the opposing team send kickoffs out of bounds. They kicked the ball to the other side of the field and squibbed kicks short. Anything to keep the ball away from Edmond, a former Kingston standout. Why? "To be honest, Coleman Edmond is the best junior college athlete in the country," said Efrain Martinez, who coached Edmond last fall at Pierce Community College outside Los Angeles. "He's that good. With his athleticism, he's literally a man amongst boys. He did it all. Coleman made me look like a real good coach."
This fall, Edmond hopes to make University of California-Berkeley coach Jeff Tedford look good, too. Edmond signed a letter of intent on Wednesday and will receive a full scholarship to play at Cal, a Pac-10 school that costs about $50,000 annually. This was some trip from Ulster County to northern California. Edmond, who played quarterback and running back at Kingston in 2005, left the school to attend Harmony Community prep school in Cincinnati. He accepted a scholarship offer from Division I-AA Wagner and red-shirted in the fall of '07.
Edmond left Wagner after a year and came up with a plan to go West. Edmond, a wide receiver and kickoff returner, enrolled at UCLA in the fall of '08 and ran on the track team that spring to try to get the attention of UCLA's football staff. He was a standout sprinter on the track team at Kingston. "I always wanted to go to a bigger school," said Edmond, who is 6-foot-2, 210 pounds. "I couldn't just sit back, I needed to follow my dream. I was just trying to get to the top, and you only live once." While at UCLA, running the 100- and 200-meter dashes, Edmond walked into the Bruins' director of football operations office and told Steven Radicevic he wanted to walk on. According to Edmond, Radicevic laughed at him.
No comments:
Post a Comment