Summer jobs, some of us have to get them while others might be trying to escape boredom. And athletes are no different. In tonight’s Center Piece feature Spectrum Sports 360 reporter Despina Barton goes beyond the X’s and O’s with a few UCF Knights football players to find out how they spent their off season around town:
- UCF players pick up summer jobs to fill downtime
- Jake Hescock worked on a horse farm
- Adrian Killins, Brandon Wimbush and Hayden Kingston worked Orlando City home matches
The boys of fall are back to the field at UCF but before they were there some found unique ways to pass their quiet summer days.
“I really just saw the ad in the newspaper and I figured it would probably be something that I’m not laying around the house, not sitting in a chair all day,” UCF tight end Jake Hescock explained.
The UCF junior tight found a summer job that was a little different.
“I worked on a horse farm. So I got there at like one o’clock, noon, and I would feed the horses and make sure they all had water and cleaned all their stalls.”
A job he was proud to share with his team.
“Hescock has a unique personality to say the least,” Knights Head Coach Josh Heupel said. “He took a lot of pride in his off-season job and made sure that everyone knew what he was doing too.”
His favorite horse was Charlie.
“When I first started I was kind of scared honestly,” Hescock said of working with horses. “These are big, they can hurt me but as we went on you kind of get to know their personalities and they are all different and it as really cool to see how they react to you.”
While Hescock preferred working with animals others spent their time in more familiar surroundings.
If you are an Orlando City Soccer fan, you might have been lucky enough to catch Adrian Killins, Brandon Wimbush and Hayden Kingston working inside the team shop on game days.
“It was just a summer gig that I did to just stay on my feet and stay busy,” Killins said of the job. “We have so much down time this summer. I said why not get out and get me a job and just see how it is working.”
While those guys made some extra cheddar not everyone on the team needed a summer job.
“I was just sleeping and just working out,” redshirt senior defensive back Nevelle Clarke said. “That’s literally what I did the whole time, sleep worked out and sleep and work out and just repeated it every day.”
As for Coach Heupel, he certainly paid his dues, despite the high profile position as a highly regarded quarterback prospect.
“I was a range boy that’s a little bit younger than my college playing days but during high school I was a range guy and would go pick up balls,” Heupel shared.
You got to do what you got to do and now that those dog days of summer are over, so are all those part time jobs.
“It was a pretty nice gig,” Killins added. “We are done with that now and onto fall camp.”
And just like that, the boys of fall say good bye to the summertime and hello to defending another AAC title.
