I know many of you would love to sit on the bench for every Kentucky Basketball game.
It is a dream of every Kentucky High School Basketball player, especially from the Mountains, to suit up in the blue and white and be a Kentucky Wildcat.
Tod Lanter, who played at Dunbar High School in Lexington, got the chance to be a walk-on for the greatest basketball program and has chronicled his time for The Sporting News.
He has broken it down into a surival guide and is titled: “How to survive as a Division I walk-on”
Here is an excerpt where he talks about his first Big Blue Madness:
The scrimmage was tied with three seconds left, and Lanter was shooting two free throws after getting fouled. While everyone in Rupp Arena was still Googling his name, Lanter calmly stepped up and hit both shots to win the game for the blue squad.
“In this state, if you wear a Kentucky uniform everybody knows everything about you,” Lanter told Sporting News. “They know your siblings names, they know your major, they know your high school GPA, they know everything. After I made those free throws, everyone knew my name. That was a pretty big moment for me.”
After the scrimmage, Lanter checked his phone. He had 5,000 new Twitter followers, 800 missed text messages and too many other notifications to count.
In Lexington, Kentucky basketball players are treated like celebrities. And suddenly, after one scrimmage, he was one.
You definitely should check out the rest of the article with a lot of behind the scenes stories and the trials and tribulations of being a Kentucky walk-on.
Check out Lanter’s first basket at Big Blue Madness, videoed by Anthony Wireman, and if you listen closely you can hear me in the background talking as usual.
