Jack Wang
On the final day of fall training camp, the Cal football team piled back into the locker room. The players were given speeches to They rushed out of the tunnel again to a mock-up of the real thing, complete with crowd noise. "Got a little chill, but I'm sure it'll be different on gameday," junior transfer Coleman Edmond said.
If there's anything Edmond knows, it's "different." When the Kingston, N.Y., native finally puts on his pads in a game for Cal, he'll be wearing the third uniform of his college career. The wide receiver was barely recruited out of high school, so he ended up playing FCS ball for Wagner College, a Staten Island campus of just 2,400 students. He wasn't satisfied staying so close to home -- college football isn't "taken seriously" in New York, he said -- so he started reaching out to bigger programs after one redshirt season.
"I called everybody," Edmond said. "You name them, I called them. I was proactive. I had garbage bags full of phone calls and notes and call backs and e-mails and transcripts. Everybody." While "everybody" didn't include Cal, his list featured schools such as USC, South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas and Miami. UCLA ended up answering his calls, and he transferred there to run track last spring, competing in 15 events. But when he tried to switch over to football last summer, things didn't go quite as smoothly.
"Some stuff mixed up with the NCAA where I couldn't play that year, so I couldn't go to camp," Edmond said. "I just ended up having to leave because I couldn't afford to stay there anymore. I don't know. Basically, I just couldn't go to camp. You know how busy coaches are at camp time and I guess they didn't want to deal with it. "I just had to do what I had to do."
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