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ckparrothead
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Finding out some more about Bjoern Werner's background. Some of this is pretty crazy.
He fell in love with the sport when he was playing flag football and then tackle football at the Club Sports level in Germany (Berlin Adler, German word for Eagles). At flag football, he played wide receiver and safety. In the club sports he played a little linebacker until his coach decided he needed to move to defensive end because that's where he had the most potential to wreck the offense. At about 15 years old, Bjoern was wrecking 18+ year old guys, and his coach recognized that he had uncommon ability. The coach (German) had never done this before, but he recommended to Bjoern that he go to America immediately and try and go through a prep school and into the college ranks. Bjoern thinks very fondly of that coach and thinks of him as much a friend as a coach, credits him for the wisdom of moving him to defensive end but also for thinking more for Bjoern's sake than his own as Werner naturally would think that a coach in that position would want to keep hold of a guy that talented rather than send him off.
This is where it gets interesting. His coach may have planted the idea in Bjoern's head, for which he's grateful, but he didn't really do much aside from that. Bjoern sees an advertisement on the Berlin Thunder NFL Europe's website for the USA Football International Student program. The program takes kids from all over the world and places them in various prep schools in the New England area, pays a little portion of the tuition and then it's up to the school to figure out how to collect the rest of the tuition. Bjoern applied to the program and was accepted.
This is a 16 year old kid and he's doing all this pretty much on his own. He approached his family about it after he'd taken care of most of it and they were only worried about the money angle, because they didn't have the money to pay for any of this. Normally an exchange student program costs you thousand and thousands of dollars, but he explained it's not like that...he wants to come over and stay permanently and play football. He told them not to worry about the money, he's 16 years old and he's old enough to take care of all of this, and his mom said OK but we really can't pay.
He began emailing Coach Chris Adams at the Connecticut prep school where he would eventually end up, expressed his desire to play there. He sent over a highlight tape of himself playing at the Club Sports level. The coach got the school to offer him sports financial aid, and the only thing Bjoern and his family had to pay for were the flights over from Germany.
He went back and forth from Connecticut to Germany during the long breaks they had at his prep school, as he had a girlfriend back in Germany that he met when he was 16 years old about 6 months before he left for Connecticut. Eventually, his senior year of High School when he was about 19 years old, they decided to get married. He said teammates don't tease him about being married but they do ask a lot of questions about it, why he got married so young, etc. His wife thinks he's a super star because of the attention college football players get by the media. As of an interview just prior to the 2011 season, he had not been back to Germany since he came to FSU. He hears that his little brother has sprouted up to 6'6" now (soccer player), but he can't even picture his own family, he only hears them over the phone.
German stereotypes that annoy him? No, he does not love David Hasselhoff. He doesn't eat sausages, he's from Berlin and that's all in the South, he says. His friends tell him, oh man you probably drink a lot (drinking age lower in Germany). He says no, I don't drink at all.
Unusually mature at an early age, married, doesn't drink, physical phenom, no sense of entitlement. Gonna make a hell of an NFL player one day.
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