As a kid, Keith Corliss used to think about colleges he would want to attend, and his mind zeroed in on one.
"I always thought Princeton," said Corliss, a senior football player and wrestler at Germantown Academy.
Lo and behold, Princeton started recruiting him for football in his junior year. Then he attended the Tigers' summer camp. Then he made an oral commitment to the program.
Now, five months later, the 6-foot-2, 210-pound linebacker/running back knows one thing about his college choice.
It won't be Princeton.
Not after a sternum injury last fall ended his senior season after two games.
Not after Princeton, he said, told him he would need to spend a postgraduate year at a private academy first. In other words, another year of high school on top of the four years Corliss has already spent - and excelled - at one of this area's finest high schools.
"It definitely came as a shock to me," Corliss said. "I had always heard that recruiting was a business, but when it affects you personally, it hits you a little deeper."
The first hit, the one that started him on the winding recruiting road, came last fall.
Of all things, it was self-inflicted.
Corliss was trying to do maximum repetitions in the bench press when he bounced the bar off his chest, he said, separating the cartilage that protected the sternum. When he played in the Sept. 9 opener, shots he took to the chest impacted his sternum. He played through the pain.
Around that time, Corliss said, Princeton told him that he would receive a "likely" letter - which, according to the Ivy League sports website, promises a student that he will be accepted if he remains on his academic track - and that he should apply for admission. He did. He also made the oral commitment and disclosed his choice to the other schools recruiting him (Cornell, Penn, Lehigh, and Bucknell).
The pain continued in the second game, and he underwent an MRI exam. He then visited Princeton and shortly after, received the MRI results, which revealed a stress fracture in the sternum. He told a Tigers coach about the fracture.
"He said it would be OK; don't worry about it," Corliss recalled.
