STINT WITH PROFESSIONAL RUGBY TEAM IS ON HIS HORIZON

ment at Sam Boyd Stadium.

Short had his sights set on making the 13-man roster for America’s top team, the Eagles, which will compete in the USA Sevens tournament. He attended a camp with about 24 others trying to make the team, but his name wasn’t included when the Eagles’ roster was announced Wednesday.

Although his goal of playing for the Eagles is on hold for now, he has a contract lined up with the San Diego Legion of Major League Rugby, whose season starts in April.

“It’s pretty crazy how fast everything has progressed,” Short says.

His ambition remains.

“It’s my main goal to play for the Eagles; I want to make the Eagles and be one of the main players up there,” he said.

Short could hardly tell a rugby scrum from a wrestling match until a classmate convinced him to try the sport after football season ended during his senior year of high school in December 2015. Short immediately took to rugby, liking that it was just as physical as football and gave him more opportunities to touch the ball. He became a standout regionally on the weekend tournament circuit.

He reluctantly put the sport on hold, however, because he had an offer to play defensive end at Adams State, a Division II school in Alamosa, Colo. “I was so focused on football and wanted to go to the next level, and it was so competitive to make the cut and get a scholarship that I was like, ‘Yeah, I have to go play college football,’” Short says. “But once I got there, I was talking about rugby all the time. I was trying to get involved with a rugby program up there. It kind of ruined football.”

Short’s freshman football season halted when he suffered a shoulder injury, and without an athletic anchor, he stopped attending class and moved back home. He started working and playing with local rugby clubs while trying to figure out his next move — right around the time he stumbled upon “Next Olympic Hopeful.” “I was like, ‘I’m just going to fill this out and see how it goes,’ ” Short says.

After winning, he participated in a three-month training camp, and his family accompanied him on the sidelines for an Eagles appearance at the Silicon Valley Sevens tournament in November in San Jose, Calif.

That’s when it struck Orosz just how far her son had come in his “second” sport.

“We watched the team he had been living with for the past couple of months, and there was just this spark in his eye where I knew it was all connecting at that point,” Orosz says. “Having lived with those men and seeing what they accomplished in representing America, he was blown away and knew that could be him one day.”