Lou Rabito: Princeton hopes ended with an ill-timed injury

As a kid, Keith Corliss used to think about colleges he would want to attend, and his mind zeroed in on one.

"I always thought Princeton," said Corliss, a senior football player and wrestler at Germantown Academy.

Lo and behold, Princeton started recruiting him for football in his junior year. Then he attended the Tigers' summer camp. Then he made an oral commitment to the program.

Now, five months later, the 6-foot-2, 210-pound linebacker/running back knows one thing about his college choice.

It won't be Princeton.

Not after a sternum injury last fall ended his senior season after two games.

Not after Princeton, he said, told him he would need to spend a postgraduate year at a private academy first. In other words, another year of high school on top of the four years Corliss has already spent - and excelled - at one of this area's finest high schools.

"It definitely came as a shock to me," Corliss said. "I had always heard that recruiting was a business, but when it affects you personally, it hits you a little deeper."

The first hit, the one that started him on the winding recruiting road, came last fall.

Of all things, it was self-inflicted.

Corliss was trying to do maximum repetitions in the bench press when he bounced the bar off his chest, he said, separating the cartilage that protected the sternum. When he played in the Sept. 9 opener, shots he took to the chest impacted his sternum. He played through the pain.

Around that time, Corliss said, Princeton told him that he would receive a "likely" letter - which, according to the Ivy League sports website, promises a student that he will be accepted if he remains on his academic track - and that he should apply for admission. He did. He also made the oral commitment and disclosed his choice to the other schools recruiting him (Cornell, Penn, Lehigh, and Bucknell).

The pain continued in the second game, and he underwent an MRI exam. He then visited Princeton and shortly after, received the MRI results, which revealed a stress fracture in the sternum. He told a Tigers coach about the fracture.

"He said it would be OK; don't worry about it," Corliss recalled.

Corliss said Princeton told him in late October that because of the injury he would not get the likely letter right away, and told him in December that he wouldn't get it at all. Instead, he said, one of the coaches suggested that Corliss - who has a 3.6 grade-point average and is taking advanced placement courses in environmental science and physics - spend the next school year as a postgrad at Mercersburg Academy.

"Germantown Academy is obviously a very challenging school, and I felt like I've been prepared for four years to move on to college," Corliss said. "And if I was moving on to a postgrad year, I kind of wasted those four years."

The thought of becoming a postgrad, he added, "went against my moral values, because I thought it put sports before academics."

By mid-December, the other schools that Corliss had considered had filled most of their recruiting needs. So he was restarting practically from scratch.

College coaches are prohibited from talking about recruits. Luke Harris, GA's football coach for six years who stepped down after last year, said what Corliss experienced wasn't "that uncommon."

"College coaches are under a lot of pressure to bring in guys that can play right away, especially if . . . they're trying to turn the program around," Harris said. "If they're recruiting a kid who is injured at the time, they can get nervous."

Corliss, 18, who lives in Blue Bell, is back healthy, wrestling at 195 pounds for the Patriots. After missing the first five weeks of the season because of the fracture, he has won 16 of 17 matches.

He visited Penn, which is recruiting him as a wrestler, on Saturday. But Corliss prefers playing football and is looking at Division III schools Franklin and Marshall and Dickinson, where he would be a linebacker. He hopes to choose by March 1.

"Everything will work out in the end, because the schools I've visited, I know those are schools that I'd love," Corliss said.

As for what he has gone through, he said, "It just made my whole recruiting experience a little tougher, and it was something I had to push through, and it's something I think I'll be better off because of, in the end. But the process itself was difficult."