Boerkircher's big dream

Most of us who grew up loving and playing sports as youth all received the same lecture from our mentors.
The odds of becoming a professional athlete are small. Have a backup plan. That’s a one in a million type story.
Thankfully, if anyone around here told that to Austin Allen, Baylor Scheierman and now Nate Boerkircher, that trio of former Huskies gave it a shot anyway.
Incredibly, Boerkircher has an opportunity to have his name called during this weekend’s NFL draft, which would make him the third Aurora athlete in the past four years to join a professional sports team’s roster.
How incredible is that?
The story of “Little Bork” -- a reference to the fact that Nate’s older brother, Ian, was bigger, until he wasn’t -- reaching professional football may be the most inconceivable of all three.
Boerkircher had zero offers to play Division I football. He always had a dream of playing Nebraska football and decided to bet on himself.
He didn’t take a scholarship offer to a lower-level program. Through blood, sweat and a lot of tears, he made enough of an impact in the classic Nebraska walk-on fashion to not only stay on the roster, but earn a spot on the field.
Boerkircher wasn’t what I would have called an especially overwhelming athlete in high school, and I sure don’t mean that in a negative way.
He just wasn’t the dominating force that we’ve seen from others. The tools were there, he just hadn’t found them or discovered how to utilize them, yet.
With the friendship and leadership of Allen as a Husker teammate in Lincoln years ago, Boerkircher started to discover those tools and how to use them.
In my latest conversation with Boerkircher featured in last week’s ANR print edition, Boerkircher made an off-hand comment that I found hard enough to believe I had to double-check.
Including his three-game grace period in 2021 without burning a redshirt year, Boerkircher played in every single college football game he was eligible for. 
All 52. 
For a sport like football, that’s insane. 
I was a bit curious on where this might take me, so I asked AI what the odds were of any high school kid reaching professional sports.
AI’s answer: “The odds of a high school athlete reaching the professional level are incredibly slim, often described as a ‘one in a thousand’ journey. For most major sports, the probability ranges from roughly 0.01 percent to 0.5 percent.”
Sounds about right. But why stop there? My next prompt asked what the odds were of three kids from the same high school reaching the pros in a five-year span.
AI’s response: “If the odds of one high school athlete going pro are like getting struck by lightning, having three from the same school in a five-year span is like getting struck by lightning while winning the powerball.
“The statistical probability of this happening at a standard, non-specialized high school is nearly zero — roughly 0.00000001 percent (or 1 in 100 million) -- if we assume the athletes are independent of one another.”
So basically, there’s no conciveable way this should have happened.
But it did.
Little old A-Town. Three kids, big dreams.
We often hear kids talking about the professional athlete in their sport who they love. They wear their jerseys. They watch their highlight reels. They know their stats.
Kids from Aurora and across the state of Nebraska have several local heroes they can look up to. Heck, the next great hero may be on the local football field or basketball gym right now.
For our guy Nate Boerkircher, hopefully someone pinches him by the end of the weekend, because he’s not dreaming. 
Keep going, Bork. Your hometown is proud!
RICHARD RHODEN can be reached at sports@hamilton.net.