His track and baseball seasons overlapped, occasionally causing scheduling conflicts. As a junior, after finishing second in the state triple jump competition in Austin, he joined his baseball teammates for a playoff game in Lorena, 90 miles north. The game ended with Kerley throwing out the tying run at home plate from right field.

“The things he’d do, it’s like he got dressed in a phone booth,” said Mike Mullins, who coached football against Kerley at Cameron Yoe High School. “You knew you’d better find a way to tackle him, or else you’d be hearing the Hutto fight song. And I heard a lot of the Hutto fight song.”

– Ben Shpigel, N.Y. Times.

Good feature from the Times on Jets rookie wideout Jeremy Kerley, who grew up in a tiny town outside of Austin, Texas.

I’m sure many — if not most — professional athletes have stories like this one somewhere in their past but I never get sick of hearing them. The best my town could boast was the legend of Mike Ryan and a couple of football stories which I shared here already. And none of those guys came all that close to playing in the NFL.

In my third game of varsity football sophomore year, I matched up against a senior nose tackle from Glen Cove named Ryan Fletcher. He had speed, strength, ability and about 100 pounds on me. He wound up scoring three touchdowns — from nose tackle — en route to what some immediately deemed the greatest individual defense effort in the history of Long Island football. He wound up at UConn and then on a couple of NFL taxi squads, but I don’t believe he ever played in an actual professional game.

That is to say I don’t envy any undersized sophomore centers who lined up across from Ndamukong Suh in his senior year of high school.