MORGANTOWN —
Josh Lider will be the first to admit that his one year at West Virginia as a placekicker after coming in from Division II Western Washington didn’t go as he planned, but he also knows that it was anything but a wasted year.
That is the beauty of college athletics, for there is a much higher calling than just what a person does on the football field and, in Lider’s case, he was an All-American.
Lider earned a degree in exercise physiology that he will pick up this weekend after a cross-country drive from his Washington home. But this was not just the case of a player earning a degree, Lider earned it by establishing a 4.0 grade point average to become one of 35 Order of Augusta scholars.
The Order of Augusta was established in 1995 to signify the 40th anniversary of the WVU Foundation and it recognized students for their contributions and achievements in scholarship, leadership and service.
He was one of two athletes to be so honored, track’s Maria Dalzot of Morgantown being the other, but Lider’s ability to reach such a level is intriguing at the least, considering the revelation he made this week while waiting in the Denver airport awaiting a flight home to Washington.
“In high school, I did not like school at all,” he revealed. “I loved sports and excelled in them.”
But school, it just wasn’t on his list of things that had much meaning. Oh, his parents pushed him.
“C’s were unacceptable,” he said.
He remembers the turning point for him and there is a lesson in it for a lot of kids who are just bouncing through school, accepting whatever they get without putting the extra effort in to take it to a higher level.
“I took a class in sports medicine,” he said.
This opened a door for him that he had not been through before.
“I fell in love with the field of sports medicine,” he said. “I remember one day my dad coming in and seeing me actually studying. He said, ‘I’ve never seen you study so hard.’”
School, you see, can be more than just reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.
That is why it is important to try different things as you go through school, learn what you like, what you don’t like. Perhaps it would be journalism or medicine or public relations or teaching that grabs you the way sports medicine grabbed Lider, giving you a direction to take in life, an interest to pursue.
That high school course changed Lider’s entire outlook upon education.
He also needed a push to change his approach, for school was still school. While at Western Washington, however, he came across a professor that took care of that. At a small Division II school, things get tough some times. You spend a lot of time on buses, a lot of time away from class.
This particular professor gave extremely tough tests and Lider was finding it hard to combine sports with academics until the professor pulled him aside.
“Look,” he said. “You like sports. Well, my tests are a competition. It’s you against me. Beat me.”
All of a sudden, Lider wasn’t looking as much at the tests as an academic challenge, but as a competition as intense as any he had on the field.
“OK,” he thought, “if it’s a hard test, I’m going to beat you.”
And from that day on he began accomplishing all of his academic goals.
Lider did what he could do at Western Washington but still had this desire to prove himself athletically. He chose WVU because it was big time football and came hoping to win the placekicking job, something he failed to do as Tyler Bitancurt, a freshman who would become a statewide hero for beating Pitt with a last-second field goal, beat him out.
“I’ll be the first to admit I did not have the best of seasons,” he said. “But I was able to help out. I kicked off. I helped other guys get better, give them tips.”
And here’s the best part.
Lider hasn’t given up his athletic dream yet.
“I’m going to take a year off and pursue football,” he said. “I want to see what happens until God slams the door shut.”
If he makes it, great.
“From my stats in high school, there was no way I should have kicked at Western Washington. From my stats at Western Washington, there was no way I should have kicked at West Virginia. Yet I did both. We’ll see.”
And when that ends, he’ll head for medical school to live the life he most wants to live.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
