ANNVILLE, Pa. — As the Annville-Cleona football team attends a team camp before the season, senior Alex Long would much rather be wearing a helmet.
"I definitely am trying to help my teammates out as much as I can," said Long. "Obviously, I can't really participate right now. I have to take it easy because Coach Gingrich wants me to take it easy."
A hamstring injury during the tail end of his junior Track and Field season greatly altered was was supposed to be a busy summer.
"I wanted to go to UPenn. I know I have an offer from them but they wanted to see me as a safety," recalled Long. "So I wanted to head up there. I wanted to go head to Brown, Fordham, Columbia, and Holy Cross. Those are all high schools on my list and also Colgate."
As you can tell by the schools showing interest in him, it's not just on the football field where Alex turns heads.
"The big thing for him is he's almost a 4.0 student," said Annville-Cleona Head Coach Matt Gingrich. "He's very good academically, so he has a lot of Ivy League schools interested in him."
And one subject that he's passionate about is journalism. In addition to football camps, Alex, unfortunately, had to miss out on serving as a national youth correspondent at the 2022 Washington Journalism and Media Conference this month.
In fact, the Dutchman has learned through storytelling that a minor setback can set the stage for a major comeback, much like the one he hopes to have this fall.
"In journalism, you need to find the part of the story where the person overcame something that makes them great. You have to find that. In football, that happens all the time. Tom Brady with his ACL surgery, Tom Brady getting drafted 199th overall, and Adrian Peterson's torn ACL that he had to come back from. They have overcome a lot of adversity, so that's what I look for when I'm trying to overcome adversity, too," said Long.