CAMBRIDGE — He almost changed his mind, but his parents insisted he stick it out.
For Cotuit’s hulking, Hollywood handsome Jameson McShea, getting up at 4:30 am every day to make the 60-mile trek to the all-boys Boston College High School was, to be blunt, almost
Cotuit’s Jameson McShea made a conscious decision to not give up and pursued his dream of playing at Harvard.
Photo courtesy of Nicole Sarvis/Harvard Athletics
too much to persevere. Rarely, he recalled earlier this week, did he arrive back home after a day of classes, weight-training and practice before 8:30 pm. It was a grind few adults would admit they’d be able to handle, nevermind a 15-year-old seeking his place in the world.
It’s the type of grind and willful decision that just a small handful of Cape’s Cod’s high school student-athletes have been willing to endure, but for that rare, small group, it’s a path that has led them to the hallowed halls of the country’s most prestigious universities.
McShea is one of six Cape Codders currently playing football or in one case, ice hockey, for one of the eight Ivy League schools: Harvard, Cornell, Pennsylvania, Brown, Dartmouth, Yale, Columbia and Princeton.
For all six, it has been a journey of learning how to succeed at an early age and maintaining that quest to continue to succeed not only for the four most difficult years of an adolescent’s life, but the four years immediately after high school. College can be a time when most young adults dive headfirst into newfound freedom. Some can’t handle that freedom, but for all of these young collegiate athletes it’s always been about making the right choices and having the right influences.
McShea tore his anterior cruciate ligament in the fall of 2008 during football pre-season at BC High. It was his freshman year and he had never before played organized football. Following a successful surgery and an accelerated rehabilitation of four months, McShea joined the BC High varsity swim team just in time to compete.
But by the end of that grueling freshman year, McShea wasn’t so sure he wanted to keep carpooling or taking buses and spending his early mornings weaving through Boston traffic just so he could attack two hours of calculus. It’s a choice so few people would make.
“There was a point sophomore year where I just wanted to give up… and my parents insisted I stick with it.”
– Jameson McShea
Photo by Sean Walsh/capecod.com sports
“There was a point sophomore year where I just wanted to give up and go to Barnstable High and my parents insisted I stick with it. They said ‘look, you only have 2 ½ years to go. You can do this’,” McShea said. “I’m so glad they did.”
Sticking with it led to McShea earning three varsity letters in football at BC High, being elected a senior captain, being named the Catholic Conference Lineman of the Year and the Division 1 Boston Globe Player of the Year in 2011, among countless other accolades. A top student, McShea suddenly found himself standing in the Harvard Quad in the heart of Cambridge, books in one hand, football in the other.
Fast-forward to 2014 and now those commutes are a distant memory as the hard-hitting, relentless football star is a defensive end for the Harvard Crimson football team. A junior studying political science, McShea says he would not have traded the road less travelled for such experiences as playing in front of 35,000 fans in the Harvard-Yale game each November or beating Princeton this fall, 49-7.
To put it simply, playing football and matriculating to Harvard has opened doors and offered experiences he wasn’t even aware had existed. He said he is considering applying for the US Navy Officer Candidate School and pursuing a career in intelligence or surface warfare and possibly using future military service as a means to afford graduate school. The son of Kevin and Michele McShea of Cotuit has come a long way from the unsure high school freshman to the focused, driven Ivy Leaguer.
“Parental guidance and my friend groups helped push me through,” McShea said. “The brotherhood I became a part of (at BC High) was such a huge part. They picked me up. Being a part of the football team at Harvard has really helped offset the academic workload.”
Making a conscious decision to follow a difficult but worthy path is something Ryan (Litchman) Jackson, Colby Blaze, Hayden Murphy, Luke Catarius and Max Willman all equally understand.
Jackson is a sophomore cornerback at Cornell playing varsity sprint football. Blaze played wide receiver for the Harvard Crimson this fall. Murphy is a freshman running back at Princeton and Catarius, a BC High grad who hails from Sandwich, is a sophomore linebacker also at Princeton. Willman, who graduated from Williston-Northampton, was drafted this summer by the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres and he is a freshman forward for the Brown Bears men’s ice hockey team.
Each one of these unique and vastly different young men has one thing in common other than their obvious intellectual and physical prowess: they all made a choice, as McShea did, and stuck with it.
Ryan (Litchman) Jackson has never given up his dream to play football at the Ivy League level.
Photo courtesy of Cornell Athletics
Jackson, who has never met his father and legally changed his name this year to take his mother’s maiden surname, was always at the top of his class at Barnstable High School. A football and baseball star from age nine to now, he captained the 2012 Barnstable football team to an 11-1 season and the Super Bowl at Gillette Stadium and captained Barnstable Post 206 American Legion baseball to back-to-back state championship titles. In spite of being fairly average in size at 5’9”, 170 pounds, the things that set him apart are his speed, intelligence, fearlessness and instincts. Like McShea, there was a point during high school when he knew what he wanted but grew momentarily discouraged about how to get there.
“After my junior season (in high school), I realized I really wanted to play college football,” Jackson said, but was told by a new Cornell University football coach he was undersized to compete for the Big Red Eleven. “But then the new coach said we had this lightweight varsity football program.”
Cornell, Pennsylvania and Princeton all have Sprint Football teams that compete against Franklin Pierce, Post University, Mansfield University, West Point and Navy. No player can weigh more than 172 pounds and the schools play a seven-game schedule. Each one of those programs follows the precise same regimen that regular collegiate football teams follow. Jackson was named to the All-CSFL second team his freshman year.
“I guess it (Cornell) was what I expected it to be. Just because you’re an athlete you aren’t given any special treatment. You’re expected to compete with your classmates in academics,” Jackson said. “In some schools, athletes are looked down upon… But at Cornell athletes tend to be some of the brighter students mostly because we spend a lot of time with practices, the weight room, games. So we lose a lot of time we would need to spend studying so we have to be able to study and retain the information in a shorter amount of time than other students. For us, there are no athletic scholarships. We are there for the education.”
Jackson said the entire Ivy League experience has truly heightened not only his athletic interests, but more importantly, his academic pursuits.
“Growing up on Cape Cod you kind of grow up in this bubble. I never really left Cape Cod other than for sporting events. Going out to a school that is ranked in the top-10 globally, you get exposed to all types of people from all types of cultures. I’ve learned the way different people interact and the way different people’s cultures are from around the world,” Jackson said.
Certainly, that diversity exists at many college campuses across the world. But the diversity of experience and the intensity of focus at the level these six young men have thrust themselves into is clearly an experience that is constantly intermixed with a push to be the best. To put it simply, the drive to be ranked at the intellectual apex of their peer groups is or by necessity becomes an inherent part of who they are.
That’s one of the reasons why Centerville’s Hayden Murphy, a 2014 graduate of and three-sport star at Barnstable High School, made an even more difficult choice of attending Princeton months ahead of schedule. While his boyhood pals were busy this past summer flitting from beach to beach or busing tables in local seafood pubs, Murphy left for Princeton in early July to begin taking classes and preparing for the 2014 football season. The son of Jim and Gretchen Murphy, the move paid off for the gifted running back.
Princeton University running back Hayden Murphy says the speed of collegiate football and the Ivy League academic workload is daunting but manageable.
Photo by Sean Walsh/capecod.com sports
A fine-tuned, 6’2”, 200-lb. racehorse of a young-man, Murphy made the Princeton varsity football team as a freshman and was recently selected to join the team when it travels to Tokyo, Japan this spring to play in an exhibition game. Few would argue that Murphy fully comprehends the meaning of hard work as a means to succeed.
“I spent half the summer at Princeton before fall classes even started and I took two classes so I kind of got used to what an Ivy League level class was like,” Murphy said. “It was a choice that was offered to me.”
One of the differences for Murphy from his Cape Cod Ivy League counterparts, though, was that he was heavily recruited his senior year by two dozen of the nation’s top collegiate football programs. One of the all-time greatest football players in Barnstable High School history, part of Murphy’s road was laid out ahead of him in the process of his high school career becoming a success story, as nerve-wracking as it may be for anyone who has the goal to attend an Ivy League school.
For classmate Colby Blaze, though, that road was not quite as simple and it was exceptionally nerve-wracking. The son of Jerry and Beth Blaze of Osterville, Colby is the second oldest of five boys and not nearly the size of his older brother Blake Blaze who attended Virginia on a full academic scholarship and played football there. Regardless, Colby worked incessantly during his four years at Barnstable High school to reach his ultimate goal of attending Harvard. Football wasn’t necessarily part of the plan, though.
Colby Blaze walked on at Harvard this fall and says he has fully immersed himself in the excitement and rigor of the Ivy League challenge.
Photo by Sean Walsh/capecod.com sports
Blaze walked onto the Harvard football team this fall and made the cut after the Crimson coaching staff took a look at his game films from high school and saw how relentless and bright the young man was. Potential mixed in with sheer intellect and a dash of explosive quickness all helped but did not lessen the anxiety of trying to make it work, Blaze said.
“I was nervous about the academic workload,” he said. “I was on campus for roughly two weeks (August) doing just football and getting ready for what football would be like in the fall. I was exhausted after every practice and it was real time-consuming with the meetings and all that. I wasn’t used to that kind of commitment to football so once classes got started I was nervous about the workload and wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to manage that and devote 30 hours a week to football.”
Once he became acclimated to the rigors of an Ivy League lifestyle, though, things began to come more into focus and more manageable for the scrappy, fleet-footed wide receiver.
“I found that it wasn’t as bad as what I expected it to be because football kept me so focused and busy all the time,” Blaze said. “I didn’t have any down time to goof off and mess around. I had to use my free time to study.”
The old adage that “idle hands are the devil’s playground,” may not necessarily be so far from applicable to this rare group of young athletes, but in a reverse sense, as it were.
“The practices are extremely fast,” Murphy said. “We pack a lot into a two-hour window, so we are moving from drill to drill, station to station, sprinting everywhere we go. We’re not wasting a minute of time.”
Sandwich native and Princeton football player Luke Catarius made the brutal trek each day from the Cape to BC High where he was named the Boston Herald Division 1 Football Player of the Year in 2011. He is the son of Stephen and Michelle Catarius of Sandwich.
Photo courtesy of Princeton Athletics
Murphy has not yet selected a major course of study, but Blaze said he taking courses in both economics and science. For all of these athletes, balancing a heavy academic workload with athletics is a constant focus that basically, some might perceive, boils down to the perfection of personal time management. For Ivy League football players, that means 6:00 am practices all spring before heading off to classes – there is no mythical Animal House culture. In essence, the experience has been a whirlwind of almost neverending intellectual stimulation juxtaposed with the sheer physicality of competing at a lightning-fast, intense athletic level barely comparable to the glory days of high school sports.
“I’ve met some really great people,” Murphy said. “I’ve made some really good friends with all different backgrounds from all different states and countries.”
“The first night I was there I met these three kids from some obscure country in Africa I had never even heard of before,” Blaze said. “I had never even seen it on a map or heard about it on the news and it was just really cool talking to them.”
Sandwich native Catarius had a brilliant career at Boston College High, much like his former teammate McShea. A bruising, lightning-quick defensive specialist, he’s already established himself as one of the top men for the Tigers and has a shot at a starting position next fall. Like his fellow Ivy Leaguers from the Cape, though, the road to get to where he is today was not an easy one. The sacrifices one has to make to attend school in Boston with close to three hours of commuting each day can be excruciating.
“It was difficult because the ride was so long, and I got worn down by it,” Catarius said. “(But) I knew that making the sacrifice and going to BC High would set me up for college.”
Catarius concedes that the sheer physicality of football at the collegiate level was initially daunting, as well as the pace of an Ivy League athletic and academic schedule, but he said his choice to attend a school far outside the town limits of Sandwich was a choice he will never regret.
“The speed at the college level is definitely something I had to get used to,” Catarius said. “And, although we had great coaches at BC High, a college defense is more complex and there are more responsibilities.”
He added that the academic preparation he had at BC High more than paved the way for him to duplicate that success, even at an Ivy League school like Princeton.
“Princeton is one of the top schools in the country so the work load is very tough but definitely manageable if you schedule your time the right way,” he said.
— Sean Walsh is the sports editor for www.capecod.com. His email is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @coachwalshccbm
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