[rudel.dietrich]

James Rose had always been a natural athlete. Growing up he spent countless hours in the streets and fields of his Oakland, California neighbourhood playing every game imaginable.
Stickball, touch (and tackle when no adults were around) football, soccer, footraces and of course street basketball.
Afterall, what else was there to do? You did not have many options. It was either playing sports with friends or joining a streetgang and meeting a quick end.
James was a good athlete, and had a good head on his shoulders. He had (mostly) kept himself out of trouble. He did well in school and gave his mother very little worry. Like most of his friends, he lived in a single parents household. Unlike alot of his other friends however, his father had left the family not of his own choice. He had died of cancer when James was only four.
So it was just James and his mother. She dated now and then, but never anything seriously and never any serious attempts at remarrying.
James did well enough in school, one might say above average. He was never near the top of his class. But he had no academic weakness and was liked by his teachers and his fellow classmates.
But sports was another matter. There was always sports. Organized sports were far and inbetween. Football was always there, his mother somehow always scraped together the money to get him into local leagues.
He always played for his school as well.
He liked baseball, but little leagues were out of the question. They did not exsist. He played the game in the streets and in the few rundown sandlots that exsisted. It was a bastardized version of the game. But it taught him the basics and emphasized some of the skills that would be of great use later.
He of course played basketball. Everyone played basketball. From the kids who kept their noses in books and did not play anything else. To the crack heads and gangbangers and everyone else inbetween.
James played it too, but he did not excell at it. He had some skills, but for whatever reason never had the footwork and ball skills nessacary.
For him it was football and baseball when he could find a game.
It was this way all the way until middle school.

Until this time James had attended local public schools in his neighbourhoods. He switched schools once in the 4th grade when his mom finished her technical school work and became a paralegal.
In the summer between the 8th grade and highschool was filled with tepidation for James and his mother. The highschool while barely adequete was a place where many young men got lost in the culture of ganglife and drugs.
The schools sports was centered around hoops. They had a football team of average quality. A baseball team was unheard of and out of the question.
James knew his mother always wished he could attend a private school and have a fighting chance of getting out of the streets. To make something of himself and have a better life than she had and she could give him.
But while the family was certainly better off than many of the others around them (meals were rarely missed and clothing while never even middle class was avaliable) the money to send James to a private highschool remained a pipe dream.
As was the money to relocate to a nicer neighbourhood with a public school of higher quality.
But money did exist for one thing, and that was a graduation present.
And for a present James had but one wish. Attend a 10 day football camp at the nearby University of California.
His mother saved and saved and when the time came in late June. The money was there.
And it was at this camp that James met coach D and his life was forever changed.