Oregon linebacker Bryce Boettcher joined the University of Oregon as a baseball player. Liz Brenner, a multi-sport athlete, excelled at volleyball, track and field, basketball and softball at UO. And Kendre Harrison recently played at Peach Jam, a prestigious high school basketball tournament. He plans to play both basketball and football at UO. We learn more about elite athletes and the power they hold at the college level from Lindsay Schnell, a senior writer covering college sports for The Athletic.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. In an era when even middle schoolers are more likely to focus on just one sport to specialize athletically, it stands out when top high school athletes aim to play two sports when they get to college. That is what Kendre Harrison aims to do when he goes to the University of Oregon next year and what Carter Meadows hopes to do at the University of Michigan.
Lindsay Schnell is a senior writer covering colleges for The Athletic. She wrote about Harrison and Meadows, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Lindsay Schnell: Hey, thank you so much for inviting me.
Miller: So who is Kendre Harrison?
Schnell: Kendre Harrison is one of the best tight ends in the 2026 class, who has committed to Oregon. He committed over a year ago, so that’s a little unusual to have someone commit that early. He’s a North Carolina native who dreams of being the next Julius Peppers. Of course, NFL fans are familiar with that name, a longtime defensive lineman who played both in college at the University of North Carolina and then went into a long pro career in the NFL. Kendre joked to me that he’s 6′7” right now. If he grows to be 6’9” or 6′10”, he thinks he’s going to have to focus entirely on basketball.
Miller: How unusual is it to do what Harrison and Carter Meadows want to, potentially play two high level college sports at the same time?
Schnell: Well, Meadows, as of right now, is not planning to. But it’s something he knows is a possibility. It’s very rare. And Meadows’ reasoning for, as of right now, not planning on it is a good reason why it doesn’t happen. You have to change your body often if you’re going to excel in both sports. So for Carter Meadows, who’s a defensive end that’s committed to Michigan, he’s 6′7, 235-ish right now. He’s probably gonna play at 250 to 260, that’s gonna be a good weight for him to keep as an NFL prospect. That’s pretty big for a basketball player. It would be hard to get up and down the floor, so he would have to be constantly losing weight. So it’s not something we see very often.
We do see, when there are players who play two sports, a lot of times you see football players who also do track in the spring. But a lot of that is not because they imagine finding glory within that sport, it’s about making them better for football. You see a lot of running backs taking up the sprints because they’re constantly trying to figure out how to have a better burst when they get the ball and they’re trying to score a touchdown.
But at the University of Oregon, there have been quite a few multi-sport athletes.
Miller: What is Oregon’s history with hyphenate athletes?
Schnell: Well, I always think of Jordan Kent, who’s from my era [and] was a star track athlete down at Churchill High School in the Eugene area, went to Oregon to do track, play basketball. And then he had never played football before, but got recruited to come out and join the football team. So a three-sport athlete in college – that is wild.
But he’s been far from the only one. More recently Devon Allen, who competed in multiple Olympics, was a hurdler and also played briefly in the NFL. Liz Brenner, who is arguably the best female athlete to ever come out of Oregon high school sports, did three sports at the University of Oregon. They have Bryce Boettcher, a linebacker who was drafted by a Major League Baseball team but has decided that, at least for this fall, he’s gonna focus on football.
I joked to someone the other day that Oregon obviously is known as Nike University. I think Nike would admit that their ultimate goal is world domination and it seems that that has filtered down to all the athletes who are at Nike University too, because they want to play and excel in multiple sports.
Miller: I’m wondering about the schedule. Let’s say it’s football and basketball. If your football team is in the playoffs, and the Ducks always hope that’s the case now, you might play all the way into the middle of January, that’s the best case scenario. But basketball season starts in November, they go into the spring. How do you do both?
Schnell: So probably you’re not doing both at the same time. Certainly, you’re probably not playing in basketball games if you are an important member of the football team, because the football team doesn’t want you to get hurt while they’re on a playoff run. So you’re probably popping over to practice whenever you can. Kendre said that when he was being recruited by Oregon, a big part of his desire to go there and the reason that he picked them ultimately, even though it’s all the way across the country, was they told him on his visit, “We will work with you. You can have access to the gym so that anytime during football season you want to get in the gym and get up shots, you will be able to do that 24/7.”
It’s a lot schedule-wise, because it’s not just these two practices that you’re juggling. Your players are lifting weights and working with strength and conditioning coaches. They have study hall. They are going to class. Even if a lot of athletes now are doing almost exclusively online classes, it is still taking up a chunk of their time. They’ve got homework. Now with NIL, they probably have different brand commitments throughout the week. So It’s not for the faint of heart.
Miller: Maybe Oregon has been historically a little bit of an outlier here, but what do coaches think about this?
Schnell: It’s so interesting because high school coaches are so supportive of it. Every high school coach knows that specialization, you deal with burnout, kids can get certain muscles that can get overused quicker, it can kinda kill a kid’s love for the game if they’re only playing one sport from the time they’re 7 years old.
When you get into college, it’s a little harder though, because college coaches are being paid millions of dollars to win games. Let’s be clear, that’s the only thing that matters. No one cares if you have a good GPA, if your team is doing well in the classroom. They want to know that you’re winning on the field, on the court. So college coaches want a commitment from players.
I was talking to some coaches about this earlier this summer when we were at a big recruiting event and I said what are the odds that a coach will say to a kid, “Hey, you’re not playing both. We’re not going to let that happen. You’re going to be fully committed to our program.” And a coach said, “You can’t really tell a kid that in this day and age of player empowerment. And if you do, you run the risk of them saying, ‘OK, I’m out. I don’t want you to recruit me anymore.’”
Miller: I’m fascinated by that. I want to play some audio from a video that Kendre Harrison himself put out last year. This is how a video on Instagram that he put out starts.
Kendre Harrison [recording]: My name is Kendre Harrison. I’m from Reidsville, North Carolina. Number one tight-end in the country and I’m the best dual athlete North Carolina’s ever seen.
Miller: So how does the new name, image, likeness [NIL] world play into this? Collegiate athletes can now make money from their own performance, from their own personal brands. Do they stand to make more money if they can play more than one sport?
Schnell: That’s a really good question and I think we’re all waiting to find out the answer to that. Theoretically, they could, right? They’re going to have a bigger brand, a bigger platform. They’re going to be reaching different groups of fans if they’re playing more than one sport. Although I will say that often you see with collegiate fan bases, you are a fan of every team. So odds are if you’re invested in the football team, you also know about the basketball team. But I think that there’s a huge opportunity to do more to spread your name. Kendre is already famous in his corner of the world in North Carolina, his high school coach told me that. Now imagine what it’s gonna be like when he comes out to one of the biggest brands in sports, not just college sports.
But what I’m interested to see is, this is the first year that we’re gonna have a rev share, when schools can pay athletes directly. There’s still a lot of kinks to be worked out in that situation, and we’re all waiting to see how much it happens and how many students still get to also have NIL deals. But most rev share situations, the majority of money is going to go to football. So if you play two sports, couldn’t you make more in rev share? Theoretically, yes. But then you also have to weigh again like what’s the injury concern, how is it juggling all these different things? What is your sanity worth?
Miller: And how does that affect your ability to get a deal where you can make true huge amounts of money as a professional later?
Schnell: Absolutely. And we know that as a pro, you are going to have to pick. So at some point, you might have to make a decision about what makes the most sense for me to focus on now, so in two years I’m set up to get the biggest contract. But sometimes it’s about what game you love most. Kyler Murray, who’s the quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals, he was also a tremendous baseball player in high school. He could be a professional baseball player right now and he’d probably be making more money because their contracts are insane. But he loved football more, so he picked football.
So there’s a lot to work out. I’m excited to see what Kendre does when he gets to Oregon. He seems to have a really fun personality. As a reporter, I’m always rooting for that. If this kid plays two sports, we can interview him even more. And that’s fun when you have someone who’s a great talker.
Miller: Just briefly, before we say goodbye, I want to ask you about the biggest Oregon sports news of the day or maybe a couple of weeks. Sportico broke the news today that there is a buyer for the Blazers. What can you tell us about this?
Schnell: Like everyone else, I’m kind of learning on the fly about this. But first of all, I think the most important thing for people to know is this new owner plans to keep the team in Portland. I know that had a lot of people worried and nervous, but it sounds like the Blazers are going to stay there. He’s gonna inherit an interesting project, not just the team, but the Moda Center needs either a major upgrade or the Blazers need a new arena. Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, has talked about that.
One thing that’s really interesting about this new owner, Tom Dundon, who also owns the Carolina Hurricanes, I was reading today online, Sean Highkin reported that before Dundon bought the Hurricanes, they had missed the playoffs nine straight years. Since then, they’ve made the playoffs seven of the eight years, made the second round six times and the conference final three times. So that communicates an owner who has invested and knows what he’s doing. And I know that this city really, really wants that and they are ready to get back into the Western Conference Finals, to play for an NBA championship. They got Dame back. Can anything roll with that?
Miller: Lindsay, thanks very much.
Schnell: Of course, thank you.
Miller: I should say that we are going to have more updates on the Blazers at opb.org. Lindsay Schnell is a senior writer covering colleges for The Athletic.
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