Casey Combest Wasted Talent

[system]

@100m001

Yea, I remember this guy. I saw him at the 1999 Nike indoor classic when I was warming up in the middle of the track at Ohio State Univ. He was the real deal as he put a sold gap between him and the rest of the pack at about the 30 meter mark! Kevin Jones who now plays in the NFL was in the race by the way.

Anyhow, and some of you may not like this but I blame the system more then I blame the athlete when superstar HS athletes fall by the wayside.

I mean not everybody is Collage material and if you can run world class times in HS why doesn’t a shoe company (who claim they care about running so much) or an elite coach (who claim they love the sport so much) pick up the athlete and give him a years worth of free training to see if he has the maturity and the ability to make a career out of it.

It seems to me that guys like Obea Moore, Combest, Roy Martain and others had a hard time because once they were booted out of one system (High school) and could not find a another solid system to integrate themselves into so they lost there rhythm, got into trouble or just completely gave up.

That’s just stupid. Combest was a self-proclaimed gang banger and had consistently hung out with the wrong crowd and couldn’t approach a passable level of high school in Kentucky. He had plenty of issues himself. It is not the responsibility of anybody to travel to where he was (he didn’t like living away from home :rolleyes:), train him for free for a year, and try to make him the best athlete he can be. There is some individual responsibility in this and laziness doesn’t cut it. It costs people money to do what you are proposing and if they can’t even make it through a semester of junior college then they have a lot bigger issues.