Last year Brad Selby seemed to be living out a college football player's dream. He had a full scholarship and belonged to a top-25 Stanford squad that reached the Rose Bowl for the first time in 28 years.
But for Selby, '01, it was a season of crisis. After redshirting his first year and playing in just a handful of games during the 1999 season, Selby was discouraged by his slow development. And he realized that his demanding practice schedule reduced the time he could devote to schoolwork. "I just knew I wasn't doing what I wanted," he recalls.
So Selby quit football, relinquishing a scholarship worth more than $30,000 annually. And, most wrenching, he told his father--a devoted Stanford fan--that he wasn't going to play again. But, still eager for a physical outlet, Selby found a spot in an unsung corner of the athletic world--the wrestling team.
Selby, a 285-pound, 6-foot-4-inch bear of a man, wasn't immune to the pressures facing athletes hailed as stars in high school but considered middle-of-the-pack in college. "Brad Selby, as big and tough as he is, is sort of a softie on the inside," says Chris Horpel, '74, who has coached Stanford's wrestling team for 22 years.
That introspective side was particularly evident when Selby flew to Paradise Valley, Ariz., to tell his father that he was giving up football. As the two men sat in the living room, Selby outlined his new goals--making Phi Beta Kappa, studying abroad, completing an honors thesis, competing for postgraduate scholarships. The discussion was clearly painful, but Selby says his father has now come around.
This spring Selby, a double-major in English and art history, will attend Stanford's program in Oxford. He then plans to use an undergraduate research grant to stay in Europe over the summer and do research.
Although Selby says he was a good student in high school, he admits that his passion for scholarship is a recent development. "Something happened after I came to Stanford," he says. That "something" was the teaching of professors such as Jody Maxmin in art history. "I just caught fire."
Selby, who has been elected captain, is the leader of a very young team. Of the 29 men listed on the roster, 15 are true or redshirt freshmen, competing for the first time.
Last year the team finished 7th in the Pac-10, with one individual weight-class champion, and qualified two wrestlers for the NCAAs. This year, Horpel says, the inexperienced squad is not a contender for a conference title, but he hopes to qualify as many wrestlers as possible for the mid-March NCAAs.
Brad Selby could be one of them.
