COFFEETOWN HS SPORTS

David Pollack wasn’t always a beast of a College Football Hall-of-famer. He needed some help as a slow and frustrated high school freshman.

I caught up with Pollack at he and his wife’s Pollack Family Foundation golf event recently and asked him to share a high school story from his days at Shiloh High.

Some context for the uninitiated:

Pollack and I both grew up in Gwinnett County, Georgia, a few years apart.

Shiloh doesn’t have a legendary high school football reputation or anything.

Up until recently, Shiloh’s only State Playoffs victory happened when David Pollack was a senior back in 2000.

Pollack’s transformation to a D1 football prospect didn’t take nearly as long to develop.

But for him, it felt like forever.

It took him forever to run a 40-yard dash, too.

“I showed up on campus as a freshman,” Pollack told me.

“We ran 40-yard dashes and my freshman coach (John Almond) said, ‘What position do you play?’ And I said, ‘Running back and linebacker.’ He said, ‘No you don’t, you play offensive line with a six-flat (6.0) forty.’ So I moved to offensive line.”

The difference between running slower than Christmas and getting offers from Steve Spurrier and Mark Richt? Puberty

High schoolers wonder what that age-old right of passage will be like when it happens.

High school athletes who watch their buddies start running faster and lifting heavier things and throwing things further than them need it to happen.

For David Pollack, he couldn’t reach that mysterious hormonal horizon soon enough.

By his own accord, he stood around 5’10” and weighed 220 pounds early in his playing days.

“And it wasn’t a good looking 220,” Pollack told my buddies Jake Reuse and Patrick Garbin in their book, ‘The Road to Georgia: Incredible Twists and Improbable Turns Along the Georgia Bulldogs Recruiting Trail.’

Pollack was so seemingly far away from where he wanted to be on the football field, he almost quit playing on it.

Now, if you’re a high school underclassman reading this, I want to include a disclaimer here:

Not everyone comes of age the way that David Pollack did. It wouldn’t be fair to you if I made Pollack’s story seem normal.

It isn’t.

But it’s what he needed to become the College Football, Georgia Sports, and Georgia High School Football Hall-of-Famer we know now.

“Between my sophomore and junior year I grew six inches and gained 60 pounds. I hit puberty and got big,” Pollack said.

“(Coach Almond) moved me to running back and I played defensive line. It was always a funny story, because he was the freshman coach and became a varsity coach, and he moved me actually back to being a skill player.”

That’s when Pollack turned into a terror on the football field.

He even lined up at wide receiver in some pass-heavy formations, as Shiloh made it to the Georgia State quarterfinals.

Imagine a high school cornerback lining up against that.

Not for the faint of heart, or for the slight of testosterone.

Now it’s Pollack’s turn to coach up high school talent

Pollack works on North Oconee High School’s football staff between his roles on ‘College Gameday’ and other College Football appearances for ESPN.

The Titans have a highly-qualified assistant coach drilling proper technique and workout habits into the defensive line.

Pollack can’t make it to every game due to his travel requirements for ‘Gameday.’

But even a little bit of David Pollack is a lot by most societal standards.

Look no further than the work he’s doing now for the Athens community, the Family Goals Podcast, North Oconee High School and ESPN.

Some experts believe he could have been an All-Pro linebacker or defensive end if not for the neck injury that ended his career as a Cincinnati Bengals rookie.

Pollack doesn’t waste time asking ‘Why?’ anymore.

He just does stuff.

And he probably wouldn’t be doing any of it if he quit playing ball before that 6-flat forty time turned into two years of unhinged varsity football terror.