Pleading guilty

Like most people who use their personal life experiences as reference points, it's always been perplexing that so many high school student-athletes don't earn the academic eligibility to play at the DI level. As an oldster would typically say, it wasn't all that hard to perform adequately, if not well, in high school. Trust me, it didn't take a brainiac to earn say a 3.0 grade point average.

But what so many of us fail to take into account -- because it wasn't anywhere close to our narrative -- is that we didn't attend school in an area where the odds of remaining alive at the end of the day can be based on a simple twist of uncontrollable fate, where even hyper-alertness is no guarantee of survival.

Plus, this doesn't even involve the elements of having enough to eat, academic support, parental guidance and so on.

Read Jill Tucker's opening article in a series and be thankful serendipity allowed you and I a much healthier pathway. This is an opportunity to better understand the experiences of others.