Belleville Bulls U10 AA

"Minor hockey drives me nuts...it's time to develop." - Glen Gulutzan. YOUTH COACHES: This is your reminder to rethink how you measure success with young players. 📺: hubs.la/Q04B6jMp0

Nobody wanted Baker Mayfield out of high school. So he walked on. Twice. Twelve days ago he signed a contract worth $165 million, and he now spends part of it paying for other walk-ons to stay in school. Start at Lake Travis High School in Austin, Texas. Mayfield went 25-2 as a starter there. He won a state championship in 2011. He threw for 6,255 yards and 67 touchdowns. And the big programs passed. So in 2013 he walked on at Texas Tech. No scholarship, no promises, no spot waiting for him. He won the starting job as a true freshman anyway and threw for 2,315 yards and 12 touchdowns. A walk-on starting at quarterback in the Big 12 as a freshman. That should have settled it. It did not. He transferred to Oklahoma. And he walked on again. Second school, second time paying his own way onto a roster, plus a full season sitting out to do it. Then in 2017 he won the Heisman Trophy with 2,398 points and posted an NCAA record passing efficiency rating of 203.76. Here is the line that matters most. Baker Mayfield is the first Heisman winner to begin his career as a walk-on since the NCAA created athletic scholarships back in the 1950s. Seventy years of that trophy. One walk-on. In 2018 the Cleveland Browns took him first overall. He came off the bench in his NFL debut and ended a 19-game winless streak for a franchise that had forgotten how to win. He threw 27 touchdown passes as a rookie, which was the NFL record. In 2020 he took Cleveland to its first playoff appearance since 2002 and its first playoff win since 1994. Their first playoff win in 26 years. Then on July 6, 2022, the Browns traded him to Carolina for a conditional fifth-round pick. A conditional fifth. What followed was nine months and four teams. Carolina did not work. He asked for his release in December and got it. The Rams claimed him off waivers on December 6, and he had been in that building for roughly 48 hours when they put him on the field. In his second game he drove them 98 yards for the winning touchdown against the Raiders and won NFC Offensive Player of the Week. He signed with Tampa Bay in March 2023. Two Pro Bowls. Two straight division titles. And on September 8, 2026, the Buccaneers gave him a three-year extension worth $165 million. Now here is the part almost nobody knows about. In 2025, Baker and his wife Emily launched something through their foundation called the BE Resilient Walk On Scholarship. It is not a general scholarship with his name stamped on it. Read who qualifies. You have to be a rostered varsity college athlete. You have to be receiving $5,000 or less in athletic aid. In other words, you have to be exactly what he was. Two awards of $10,000 a year, and they renew for up to three more years, so a kid can ride it through a degree. To apply, you write an essay about resilience. Here is what he said about why. "My experience as a walk-on student athlete shaped who I am today. Emily and I wanted to find a way to support future walk-ons to reach their goals and full potential." That is not the only thing they fund either. Their Giving Bowl, a bracket-style competition between Tampa Bay athletes raising money for local nonprofits, brought in over $300,000 across six charities this April, and the Mayfields put another $50,000 on top of it. And back in 2020, when COVID shut everything down, Baker and Emily gave $50,000 to the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Which is worth remembering, because today he plays the Cleveland Browns. The team that drafted him first overall, won its only playoff game in a generation with him, and then decided he was worth a conditional fifth-round pick. He is on a $165 million contract now. And somewhere out there a kid with no scholarship and no guarantees is about to get $10,000 from the only walk-on who ever won the Heisman.

When Jadarian Price was 12 years old, his mother sat him down for the conversation neither of them wanted to have. Jessica Butler was 31. She had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. And what she told her son was that she didn't know how long she was going to be here. She also told him what she was most upset about. She didn't want to miss any more of his games. Butler had Jadarian as a teenager, before she'd even started nursing school. She raised him and his two younger sisters, Kzaria and Lyricah, on one income in Denison, Texas. She worked full-time in hospice care, then cleaned toilets, drove Uber and delivered DoorDash on the side to close the gap. Then came the diagnosis, and 16 rounds of chemotherapy. Her parents and her brother drove her to every one. While that was happening, her 12-year-old son cooked for his sisters, who were 10 and 6. He took care of them. He went to middle school. He played football. She thought she was going to die. In 2017, two years after doctors handed her what felt like a death sentence, Jessica Butler was declared cancer free. She has been in remission ever since. Her son went on a tear. At Denison High School, Price ran for 4,990 all-purpose yards and 55 touchdowns in 39 games. As a senior he rushed for 1,803 yards and averaged more than nine yards a carry. He was his district's offensive player of the year twice. He picked Notre Dame over Ohio State, Texas and USC. Then it got hard again. He missed his entire freshman season to a serious injury. When he got healthy, he spent three years as the backup behind Jeremiyah Love, widely considered one of the best players in college football. Second string. Three straight years. Programs came at him with millions in NIL money to transfer. Real, life-changing money for a family that had never had any. He told them no. "It's bad when you don't come from much and then your mom hears the offer they're giving you up front," Price said. "I felt some type of way when I had to tell her I have a plan and I want to stay at Notre Dame, even though I'm going to be making half of what this life-changing money is." He stayed. His mother cried when she heard what he was turning down. In April, Jeremiyah Love went third overall to Arizona. About two and a half hours later, the Seattle Seahawks used the 32nd pick on Jadarian Price, to replace Kenneth Walker III, who had just won Super Bowl MVP and left for Kansas City. The pick came with an $8.7 million signing bonus. He knew exactly what he was doing with it. Price went back to Denison and bought his family a house. "That was the biggest goal of mine since I made it to the NFL." Then last week, he made his NFL debut at Lumen Field. He started. He ran for 52 yards on 10 carries as Seattle beat New England 13-10. Jessica Butler was in the stands. Eleven years after she sat her 12-year-old down and told him she might not be around much longer, she watched her son start his first game in the National Football League, from a seat he paid for with the same check that bought her a home. Price has said the whole thing pretty simply. "I truly believe that in order to grow, you have to go through pain and adversity. Watching my mom go through that, it made me believe there's nothing that could stop me. She went through the worst. So what's one more bad day of adversity for me?" She didn't miss the game. Hat tip to Andrew Destin and @TheAthletic, who told this story first. For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap

Josh Allen reveals he had zero scholarship offers coming out of high school so he sent 1,000 emails with his highlights attached to every coach in the country, only two responded “The email said something like, Hey, I’m Josh Allen. I’m 6’5”, 220 pounds. I feel like I’d be a great fit for your program. Here’s my Hudl. These are my stats… I literally just went copy, paste, copy, paste and sent it to every single coach I could find an email for.” “I played in a small town called Firebaugh, California. I had zero offers out of high school. I had no preferred walk-ons. A couple Division III schools were trying to give me academic scholarships so I could go play there, but I didn’t want to make my parents pay for me to go somewhere.” “So I went the junior college route. I felt like I was good enough to play, which is obviously why I kept going. I wanted to go to junior college, earn a scholarship and kind of pay my family back for everything they had done for me.” “I also played football, basketball and baseball. I was a three-sport guy, so I didn’t spend my summers going around to every quarterback camp. I got the chance to play different sports, feel different emotions, meet different types of people and learn how to deal with all of it.” “I think that’s something a lot of kids need to continue doing, play more sports. Every sport teaches you something that you can ultimately use later in life.”

On the car ride home after a game… hold your tongue. My biggest regret as a parent is that I talked way too much about my kids’ performance after games they played. And specifically, I focused way too hard on explaining exactly what they should have done differently and better. If I could go back in time, I would tell myself: Just shut up, Jon! Let them enjoy the game. Let them enjoy the moment. Unfortunately I caused them to tie their identity to their performance. This was poison for their pure love of the game. So don’t make the mistake I did. Don’t talk at your kids after a game. Don’t analyze. Just tell them you love watching them play and make them feel loved. When they are adults they’ll be glad you did.

Funny how many parents think their kid needs a tournament every weekend. The truly elite players don’t play that much. They pick the biggest events, play the best competition, then get back in the gym and work. Elite players don’t chase tournaments. They chase development.

Parents: That "showcase event" looks like opportunity, but it's not. Kids lose sleep, travel far, are put through rote repetition & play bad ball in front of no one. These events profit off hope. True exposure comes from real development, trusted competition, not hype cash grabs.