A True Scholar Athlete

With an overall lack of interesting stories to write about, I decided that I would choose one that I've been keeping my back pocket for about a week now. Sorry folks, no beef today.

Today, our story brings us to Oakland Park, Florida, to Dillard High School, the place where one of the top safeties in the football recruiting class of 2011, Wayne Lyons, attends school and plays football.

With 44 scholarship offers, some from the likes of powerhouses such as Florida, Alabama, Notre Dame and Ohio State, as well as many other top-notch programs, Lyons certainly has a lot to think about going into his senior year, and of course, like anyone else, he wants to make as informed of a decision as possible.

That's why he has mailed each coach who has sent him scholarship offers a questionnaire with 50 questions. The questionnaire has questions ranging from professor-student ratio to what airport his mother would fly into, if she wanted to come to a home game. Sure, maybe it seems like this is a kid who seems to be a bit cocky, in thinking he's good enough to get the best coaches in college football to answer a questionnaire like this. But if you think that, then you really don't know Wayne Lyons.

Lyons, isn't just another stuck-up, entitled high school football stars that seem to be all too common these days. Lyons puts as much emphasis on the scholar as he does the athlete, in the term scholar-athlete, something which is very rare among players of his caliber. Instead of struggling to get his GPA high enough to actually play football, Lyons is on track to finish as valedictorian of his graduating class, as he currently has a weighted 5.0 GPA. Sadly, guys like Lyons have become the exception instead of the norm.

But that's not all. When he's not making hits on the gridiron, or studying for that matter, Lyons, is working with his school's Hi-Tech Team, which builds robots. This goes hand in hand with the fact that he wants to become an engineering major, and after his playing days, an engineer. It's so important to him that question #37 on his questionnaire asks, How many African-American players have graduated with an engineering degree in the past five years? Year-by-year? Please list their names.

In an interview with ESPN, Lyons said that during the recruiting process, he has learned to "always stay humble, and work hard and it will pay off."

Now, I can see why some would criticize the questionnaire, despite the fact that Lyons and his mother only have good intentions in sending it out to coaches. I'm not sure how he would learn to stay humble from the process, when he is the one expecting coaches to answer his 50 questions. I know coaches go out of their way to woo their recruits, but even this could be considered a bit too much. The huge football programs recruiting Lyons, are also recruiting about everyone else out of the top 150 players in his graduating class. I know every recruit wants to be shown attention. I would hope that a player as smart as Lyons would realize that coaches cannot devote so much time and effort to just to him, and therefore, that he doesn't base his whole decision on the answers to the questionnaire, most of which will probably done by some lowly team manager instead of the actual coach. Instead of relying on the questionnaire, Lyons should do most of his own research, and find out about each school for himself.

That being said, hopefully most coaches and critics will realize how special and unique Wayne Lyons really is, and how if any recruit is worth filling out 50 questions for, it's him.