Some kids try a sport for a season and move on. Walker Forrester started at four years old and didn't stop until he graduated from high school.
Four sports as a kid
Growing up in Loganville, Georgia, east of Atlanta, Walker played four sports: baseball, basketball, football and wrestling. Each one asks something different of a young athlete.
Baseball is a game of patience and repetition. You wait, you watch, and when the moment comes you have a fraction of a second to react. Basketball is the opposite: constant motion, quick decisions and teamwork in tight spaces. Football is about doing your job on every play so the whole unit works. And wrestling may be the most honest sport there is. There is no one to hide behind on the mat. You win or lose on your own preparation.
Playing all four meant a calendar that rarely had an empty season.
Baseball and football in high school
By high school, Walker had narrowed it down to two: baseball and football. He played both. That means two seasons of practices, games and conditioning each year, with very little off-season in between.
High school sports teach things that don't show up in a box score. Showing up on time, every time. Listening to coaches. Taking a hard loss and coming back to practice the next day. Being part of something bigger than yourself, where your effort affects everyone else on the field.
An honor student, too
What makes Walker's sports years stand out is that he didn't let them crowd out school. He graduated with A's and B's as an honor student.
Anyone who has played a high school sport knows how hard that is. Practice runs late, games take up whole evenings and weekends, and homework still has to get done. Doing that for two sports, year after year, takes real discipline and time management.
Still a fan
Walker's love of sports didn't end when he stopped playing. He is a fan of the Tennessee Volunteers in college football, and of Atlanta's own Falcons and Braves. In September 2018 he was at The Battery Atlanta, the neighborhood built around the Braves' ballpark. The sports page has the full timeline.
What sports gave him
The habits that come from more than a decade of organized sports tend to stick: structure, effort, resilience, and the understanding that improvement comes one practice at a time. Those same habits show up elsewhere in Walker's story, from the long hours of learning to code at the Georgia Tech coding boot camp to his interest in fitness and healthy living.
He started at four. He finished as an honor student and a two-sport high school athlete. For a kid from Loganville, that's a run worth being proud of.