Kenny Jones:  

My Story is not really my story but the story of my son, who has let his mom and I come along for the ride. As you can tell from the photos my son Kameron decided to focus on football when he entered high school. I was relieved after going year round for about 5 years in baseball, basketball and football. With football I figured we'd be busy 10 to 12 weeks a year and finally get a break. Wrong. Our coach didn't get to be the all time leader in wins in Orange County history by working part time. We were told we'd get about 3 weeks off a year. It's worked out to be more but I can tell already I'm going to miss it. From the heartbreak to the celebrations it's been special. The best part is what I've learned about the young man I've helped to raise. He has worked hard and not always been rewarded. He has learned to fight through adversity and pain and yet remain a decent human being. He has been accused of being too nice in football but still received the MVP of this year's team. He gets it. How many 17 year old guys get it? He's no angel and he's certainly not perfect but he's become a tremendous young man. I'm proud and very thankful. In the beginning of the recruiting process last year we started receiving letters from schools all over the country, mostly division III, all the Pac 10 schools but USC, Northwestern from the Big 10 and some private schools. By the time I had all his highlights edited down we had 50 schools who requested film and transcripts. 4 were from the Ivy league. We suspect our D Coordinator had gotten word out to the Ivies once he found out how high Kam's grades were. Also interest from the big schools stopped abruptly. Same D Coordinator was telling the big schools Kam was interested in the Ivy League. We had to ask some local connections to work behind the scenes just to get an unofficial visit to Stanford which was his "Dream" shot school after we toured there last May. Northwestern was next and didn't think we'd be interested in the BIG 10. When we visited in Sept. to show our interest we found out they hadn't waited and had already offered scholarships to 3 linebackers. We didn't think it would be possible to qualify for any Ivy schools but we started looking closely at Princeton when we found out their linebacker coach was really interested in Kam. They quit calling when he fell to their lowest recruiting tier due to his class ranking. I never thought I'd see the day a kid would get penalized for going to a great school but here it was. Kam has a 4.2 GPA and 1900 on his latest SAT but wasn't in the top 10% of his class which is kinda the recruiting standard at Princeton?? What? Kam's 91st in a class of 727 which is the kind of school where most of us would like our kids to go but Princeton had other needs for their lowest level recruits, so he was out. We started talking with Fresno State and San Diego State again figuring he couldn't qualify for the Ivy League. After a couple more weeks 3 Ivies st...Expand for more