Podcast 1

The podcast is hosted by Sam Schmendel, a freshman football player at the University of North Dakota. The episodes will focus on the life of a college football player, including the challenges, successes, and the physical and mental effects of the sport. Sam's passion for football started at a young age and he worked hard in high school to get to where he is now. He grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and his love for football began in his neighborhood where he played with other kids. He attended Schrader Middle School and then went to Grand Forks Central for high school, where he excelled in football, basketball, and baseball. Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sam continued to work out and improve his strength. He had a successful junior and senior year and was recruited by the University of North Dakota. Sam is excited about his decision and hopes to continue growing as both an athlete and a person. Hello, welcome to the Sam Schmendel podcast. I'm Sam Schmendel. I'm a freshman here at the University of North Dakota, and I play football. So I'm a freshman football player in the middle of my second semester. And so yeah, the focus of this podcast and the podcast and the episodes I'll be creating will be on college football player, the life of a college football player, what's it like to be a college football player and all the stuff that we go through, all the different challenges, all the different successes, pros, cons, the stuff that we do to make ourselves better for the sport, like sleeping and eating, the mental effects, physical effects, how we got to college football, the schedules, preseason, end season and the daily life. And then the different positions of football. We'll talk a little bit about like what our favorite and the best ones and least favorite ones and then also why we were playing college football. My passion for college football started at a really young age. And you know, in our later episode, we'll talk more about this but I just always loved football. It kind of like was just a thing to get away with. I guess sports in general, I played football, basketball and baseball in high school, it was all something that just took me away from any challenges or anything that I was going through in other aspects of life. And football was just like a fun thing to like do. It was just, it was a fun activity and I loved doing it. And it was something that I just, I wanted to continue at the college level if I could. So I worked really, really hard in high school and put in a lot of work so I could get here. And now that I'm here, it's really cool. And I just want to keep getting better and see how far my potential can get me and how far this work and the mindset that I have will get me in this sport but also in life because a lot of stuff that we do in football translates over to life and it's just, it's just a good thing to do because it helps you in a lot of aspects, mentally and physically. I actually grew up here in Grand Forks, North Dakota, so I'm a hometown kid. I grew up in Riverside neighborhood until I moved in about, I think, late elementary school to the Middle East part of town. So that was, it was kind of a harder transition because I really liked the North end of town. I really liked Riverside. And, you know, that's kind of where my love for football began because we had a lot of neighbor kids and a lot of kids in town or in the neighborhood that loved sports. So we played football and baseball a lot in the grass field across the street from my house, which was really fun and that was cool and that's how I grew my competitiveness and my interest in the game. But it also grew a, like, work ethic because you always want to, like, find ways to get better. So, I mean, there was a dike along with the grass field because of the river and the flooding. So you always wanted to get better and so running up that dike was one way to get faster and do a bunch of drills to jump higher and just become better at football. After moving to the middle part of town, that kind of, that stuff translated. You know, I remember moving here and people telling me, like, a lot of kids didn't play sports in the neighborhood or do much in the neighborhood before we came. And that was something that we thought was pretty cool. We got to change that and we got to play, we taught everyone or, like, got everyone to play football, wiffle ball, basketball, hockey, just every sport that we could and, like, running games, stuff like that. It was really cool to see, like, the neighborhood and all the kids come together and play games and it kind of brought the neighborhood alive and that's kind of where I think my athleticism kind of grew as a kid but it didn't really grow as much until, I'd say, middle school-ish. That's when I kind of, like, put in a lot more work and learned to get stronger and that kind of helped me get faster and along with my other athleticism, like, athletic abilities. I attended Schrader Middle School. So after that, I, my dad is actually the principal at Grand Forks Central and I always wanted to be a Grand Forks Central Knight. I always went to their games, football, basketball, baseball, and I always wanted to play for Central so that was an easy decision for high school. So I went to Central. Freshman year, I played freshman football. Basketball, I would play C-Squad and I played varsity baseball but sophomore year is kind of when I took off for football. I was able to play varsity and I got a lot of awards offensively for being one of the top receiver on the team. Basketball, I got some varsity time and baseball was canceled because of COVID. During that COVID time, I did a lot of working out and that's kind of where I grew. I was about 160 pounds my sophomore year and my junior year I was about 190. So that's kind of where I grew my strength and my work ethic even more and after that, I had a really good junior and senior year for football along with other sports and the recruiting process came about and I chose to go to the University of North Dakota and it's a decision that, you know, that I thought is pretty good and I like it so far so we'll see what happens. Thanks for listening to the first episode of the Sam Strinell Podcast and I hope you all have a great rest of your day and week. Thank you.