Marquis Young

Marquis Young is rushing toward success

Being recruited by the UMass Amherst football program gave Marquis the opportunity to work toward a career that will help the people in the difficult neighborhood where he was raised.

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UMass Video Profile Series Transcript :Marquis Young

I just finished my sophomore season in Fairport, New York, and UMass is one of the first teams to actually come to me and ask me how I feel about college and if I want to play college football. Loyalty meant so much to me from UMass, and it was always loyal from day one. They treated me like family. Family means a lot to me. I'm real family-oriented. And being so far away from my family has been a little bit of a problem because a lot of things have been going on back at home. I lost my brother last summer. He got killed. So all these boys-- they've been like my brothers since then. Last year, I don't think there was a game I played and I didn't cry just because it's the reality of the dream I used to have when I was a kid watching them play on Saturday nights. I wanted to be a clinical psychologist because, like my brother and a lot of people from my neighborhood, I've seen a lot of people who have been killed and been through a lot of stuff that they'd never want to talk to people about. So I feel like if I get my degree, I can help people around the world talk about things like that because the more stress you have inside you, it makes you go crazy. And you can't really focus with stress. So to have somebody that you can sit and talk with, and people can motivate you and give you ambition-- that's what I want to do. People don't really see you on the football stage. They don't see you outside of the helmet, so in the classroom when they can see me and they can see me putting in work, they know how important it is to be a student as much as it is to be an athlete. I came from nothing from where I'm from, so being here at UMass-- it just means so much to me and my family. I'm lost for words. I just really want to say thank you from my heart. I'm Marquis Young, class of 2019. I stand for dreamchasers and I stand for UMass.

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