Meet Justin Sorensen

August 13, 2008

I took the day off yesterday to play at Timp Lodge at Sundance with Julie’s family.  In the morning I went to Julie’s brother Justin’s practice with the BYU football team.  Justin is probably 6′ 2″, 230 lbs, and ripped.  He holds the Utah high school state record in the powerclean and is the reigning national high school powerclean champion. He benches about 350 lbs, squats over 500 lbs and can clean over 340 lbs.

He’s also a kicker.

He wanted to play linebacker but his high school coach saw his kicking potential and told him that one day he would thank his coach for only letting him kick.  Now, Justin is one of the top freshman kickers in the country.  He’s got a killer leg, holding the Utah state record with a 63-yard field goal (and some 70-yarders in practice) and with kickoffs that often go through the goal posts, approaching 90+ yards long.  The publicity he’s gotten over the last year-and-a-half or so since BYU offered him a scholarship is crazy.  He’s probably the most popular BYU player to never play a down of football, and is interviewed and/or mentioned all the time in the paper and on the news.  So he’s got a ton of pressure on him going into this season.  The practices are only open to media and family members, so I took advantage of being down in Provo and went to watch.  It was a pretty good practice and I met Lavell Edwards (told him I was Buss Williams’ grandson – my grandpa was Lavell’s coach when he played at Utah State), Ian Dulan, and Mo Foketi in addition to talking with Justin and Danny (Julie and Justin’s cousin), a safety, about how things were going.  Anyway, here are a couple videos from byucougars.com and YouTube about Justin.

Posted in Random Musings