When an after-midnight hunger boils up in Tim Smisek’s stomach, a nearby Burger King quickly quenches it. That’s not like back home.
When Smisek walks down the street, none of the passing cars contains a familiar face. That’s not like back home, either.
Smisek, a freshman defensive lineman from Northfield, Minn., pop. 17,820, is one of about 20 Northwestern players who has made the leap from quiet Anytown, U.S.A., to the first suburb north of the country’s third-largest city.
“Coming here was a shock,” said Jonathan Fields, a fifth-year senior wide receiver from Sweeny, Texas, pop. 3,684, about 60 miles southwest of the Houston area. Fields said his biggest surprise came when he realized that instead of smiling back, passers-by would snub most of his attempts to say “hi” when he walked down the street.
Unfamiliar passing cars weren’t the only things some of the former townies endured when they showed up in Evanston.
Kicker Slade Larscheid, a junior from the Black Hills town of Spearfish, S.D., pop. 8,650, said having to meet new people after knowing everyone in his town took its toll. However, he said, having the football team and its built-in social system helped.
Coach Randy Walker knows all about the town-to-city experience. Walker grew up in Troy, Ohio, pop. 22,029, and attended college at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, pop. 23,888, where he later coached.
“At heart I’m a small-town kid and I still struggle with the metropolitan area,” Walker said. “The sheer size of it, the numbers, make it difficult.”
While Walker said NU’s location may drive away some small-town recruits, it also can attract them. Redshirt freshman Chaz Richart, of North Vernon, Ind., pop. 6,421, said it’s the reason he came to NU.
“I wanted to come up here, like, back when I was an eighth-grader,” said Richart, a walk-on whose hometown rests about 60 miles north of Louisville, Ky.
Several of the Richart’s fellow former small-town boys also had nothing but good things to say about the move.
Back home, they said, activities were predictably scarce. During the day, some – like Larscheid and center Adam Crum, a third-year sophomore center from Anchor Point, Alaska, pop. 1,845, about 200 miles south of Anchorage – took to the outdoors.
At night there was even less to do, “no cool place to be,” said Smisek, a freshman walk-on whose hometown rests about 40 miles south of Minneapolis.
“The coolest thing (back home) happened my senior year when the McDonald’s actually stayed open until midnight,” Crum said. “Everything else, though, was pretty much closed by eight.”
For Richart, the cool place to be was a grocery store parking lot.
“It’s pretty sad, actually,” he said.
Boredom wasn’t the only option. Fields said he and his classmates found an interesting nightlife by making the hour-plus drive from Sweeny to Houston.
Others, though, said they had to do a little adjusting to the Evanston and Chicago nightlife.
“It’s not (throwing) stuff off the bridge or cow-tipping,” Larscheid said.
“It’s not just counting cows and things like that,” Richart said.
Jokes aside, there’s still that soft spot in many of their hearts for their hometowns. Most of Richart’s family lived down the street from him, making reunions regular affairs. The father of Adam Hahn, a freshman defensive lineman from Hartford, Wis., pop. 11,508, owned a business, so everybody in town knew the Hahns, he said.
Cornerback Deante Battle, a third-year sophomore from Atlanta who later moved to Fayetteville, Ga., a town of 12,930 people just outside the Atlanta area, even said coming back into a metro area made him realize the small town is where he wants to be when he graduates.
For now, though, Battle and the rest of his small-town buddies remain on the edge of one of the country’s grandest cities, where the strangers don’t smile but the action never stops.
“It’s been an adjustment,” Smisek said, “but it’s been a really fun one.”
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