December 5, 2024, on TheRinger.com
https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/05/college-football/ashton-jeanty-heisman-trophy-boise-state-running-back-2024-college-football-playoff
For miles and miles, Ashton Jeanty peered out the window of the team bus, watching the European countryside float past him. It was 2018, and Jeanty was a ninth grader on the Naples Middle/High School Wildcats football team, traveling with his teammates from their small Italian farmland town of Gricignano Di Aversa, on the outskirts of Naples, to play a game in Spangdahlem, Germany.
This particular bus trip would take 18 hours—one way. But for Jeanty, who had moved to Italy with his family two years earlier, it was thrilling to pass through Austria, Switzerland, France, and so many unfamiliar places, where a kaleidoscope of cultures awaited him. “You’re blessed,” Jeanty’s mother, Pamela, would tell him. “Some adults save their whole lives to get to see Europe.”
The Wildcats team was made up of international students and American teenagers like Jeanty, the children of military families who lived near the U.S. Naval Support Activity Naples base, and they mostly competed against other American military schools. They flew to Spain to play, and once, on a football trip to Belgium, they had to walk an hour to meet their bus because a marathon in Brussels had closed streets and snarled traffic near the airport. (READ FULL STORY HERE).
Mirin Fader 