For A&M stars, paths to the top vary
Aggies credit their sporting success to childhood activities like backyard games with family and playing on youth teams
COLLEGE STATION — Texas A&M’s Asa Lacy didn’t simply stumble into owning one of the strongest arms in college baseball last season.
Lacy built up his arm strength over years — sometimes leaving those around him ducking at his latest sling.
“I threw everything — footballs, baseballs, you name it,” Lacy said of growing up in College Station and then Kerrville. “Anything I could get my hands on to throw, I threw.”
It helped that his youth baseball coaches from the beginning of his development did not allow rainbow tosses of any sort — the high-arching launches taking too sweet of a time to arrive at their target.
“My coaches always made us throw everything on a line, even from a very early age,” Lacy recalled of keeping a heave low to the ground. “There was no ‘lollipopping’ the ball.”
The Kansas City Royals selected Lacy fourth overall in this summer’s draft, making him the highest-selected A&M baseball player in program history. He’s one of thousands of Aggies in a load of sports who can point to constructive activities and routines in their youth leading to sporting glory.
Take A&M quarterback Kellen Mond, a four-year starter entering his senior season, who credits a different sport for helping pave his way in football.
“When I was really young, playing basketball and football were things I especially loved,” Mond said. “But my athleticism really took off when I started running track. I feel like track provides the base for all sports, in understanding your balance and running form. I started running track when I was in elementary school, and that was a huge part in enabling me to have the athleticism that I do today.”
Mond, one of the top dualthreat quarterback prospects in the nation three years ago, used his running ability to blast past the Oklahoma State defense in the second half of last season’s
Texas Bowl, in directing a comeback victory with a 67-yard touchdown sprint in the fourth quarter to earn bowl MVP honors.
At about that same time in December, A&M basketball fans in Reed Arena were discovering the most thrilling Aggies dunk specialist in memory. Juniorcollege transfer Quenton Jackson willed himself into the role by refusing to give up when he was barely grabbing the rim a few years ago.
“I didn’t even start dunking until my freshman year of junior college,” the high-flying Jackson explained. “I don’t know where (the sudden ability) came from, but I think it’s from the fact that I just kept jumping. When most people figure out they can’t dunk, they just stop. But I was motivated to dunk, and just never stopped jumping.”
Standout A&M athletes and their counterparts across the nation typically didn’t begin excelling at their respective sports as kids by lounging around playing video games — it usually took long hours of single-minded devotion, often in the robust heat of a Texas summer.
“There’s no easy way to get there,” A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher said of becoming among the best at one’s endeavor.
Sometimes, however, excelling at a sport is an unintended but agreeable consequence of relentlessness. When former A&M pitcher John Stilson was growing up in Texarkana, he spent a ton of time at his grandparents’ house three doors down from his home, where out of boredom he’d consistently pound a brick wall with a tennis ball.
“I’d throw the tennis ball against the wall, and then field it like I was making a play,” Stilson said of a make-believe game that helped him develop a 97 mph fastball en route to A&M and then a pro career.
Sometimes a rural setting helps a willing youngster as well. Former A&M outfielder Tyler Naquin, now with the Cleveland Indians, grew up north of Houston near the banks of Spring Creek, with plenty of room to roam, hit and throw.
“Tyler would go down to Spring Creek with these sawedoff broomsticks and hit rocks all of the time,” recalled his father, Ken .
The sweetgum trees in the Spring-Klein area also helped Naquin develop a sharp eye for the ball.
“I’d pitch those sweetgum balls to him,” his dad said.
A little brotherly shove, too, helped Naquin develop one of the best outfield arms A&M fans have witnessed at Olsen Field. Ken said
Tyler and his older brother, Zac, regularly played catch on the family’s property leading to the creek.
“When they started playing (Little League), I went ahead and put a baseball diamond and backstop on that pasture,” Ken said. “He and his brother did a lot of throwing out there, and a lot of that was seeing who could throw farther.”
Wide-open space near Shepherd in East Texas also helped another former A&M pitcher, Stephen Kolek, develop his arm strength. He and his brother, Tyler , grew up on the family’s ranch and spent plenty of their daylight hours working the property. When the sun finally went down, however, it didn’t stop the development of their baseball skills.
“After we’d get done with working or whatever we needed to do, we’d go inside the barn, turn on the lights and just play catch,” Stephen said.
Their father also built a pitching mound in an alleyway near the horse barn, and the Kolek brothers spent hours throwing to each other off the mound — and also against a big rubber mat when one or the other wasn’t up for a game of catch.
“It was something that we did so much, it helped us get to where we are,” Tyler said.
Tyler became an East Texas legend seven years ago by throwing the ball 100 mph while at Shepherd High School, and the Miami Marlins selected him second overall in the 2014 draft out of high school. He has fought through an arm injury in the minor leagues, while Stephen helped lead A&M to the 2017 College World Series and was an 11th round selection of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2018 draft.
A current Aggie who hopes to lead the football team to its pinnacle is Zach Calzada, who owns the strongest arm of any A&M quarterback in memory and was expected to give Mond a fight for the starting gig this past spring before the COVID-19 pandemic canceled spring drills.
Calzada’s father, Hector , said his son was 5-8 as a sophomore in high school back home in Georgia, but despite being considered undersized for quarterback, worked tirelessly to develop a strong arm and rapid release.
By late in his junior year, Calzada had grown another six inches, and the combination of his doggedness and fresh physical stature suddenly made him one of the nation’s top prospects in 2019.
“Zach had to really work on his technique to generate arm strength versus his size,” Hector said of his son’s early development. “When the size suddenly kicked in, his technique was there, and that’s where his explosive strength came from.”
The difference between an athlete excelling between the lines and the student in the stands cheering on the performer often comes down to what’s between the ears and inside the chest of a youngster. And what a mind is willing to make a body do — even when it doesn’t want to — on the way to sporting success.
“When you work so hard for something and then you get there and understand how to do it, it makes it hard to give it up — it makes you grind through those times,” Fisher said.
“There’s no easy way to have success.”