By Dan Karpiel

The Surveyor

The road to success is often littered with potholes.

For Berthoud High School (BHS) senior Jake Lozinski, those potholes came in the form of two broken hips, one suffered in the spring of his freshman year during baseball and the second coming a few months later on the football field.

But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Lozinski recovered from the devastating injuries, returning stronger – both mentally and physically – and last Friday at BHS signed his National Letter of Intent to continue his football career at Adams State University in Alamosa.

“I broke my left hip freshman year during baseball, but the next fall I broke my right one in football, and I said, ‘This can’t be happening again.’ It was just such a shock to my brain. I’m obsessed with the sport of football and I didn’t know what to do with myself at first,” Lozinski explained. “It’s hard because you have to stay on crutches, and staying on crutches was pretty hard, and I knew after I was done with the crutches I would be better. Yeah it did; maybe it is what God had me go through to get my butt up and get back to work.”

Lozinski, who has lettered in football, basketball and baseball at BHS, earned All-Conference honors for football, and this past January played in the Blue-Grey All-American football game, explained he realized playing college football was an attainable goal back in middle school. “I knew I wanted to do something in college, sports-wise. I’ve always enjoyed all of them; football probably eighth-grade year, seventh-grade year it was football became my favorite sport, and I wanted to play football for the rest of my life,” he explained.

Yet, as his mother, Kelly Lozinski, explained, she could see it even before then. Kelly shared a story about Jake as a young boy, wearing a football helmet “all the time, everywhere,” always carrying a football with him wherever he went. “When he was really little we bought him a Broncos helmet and he wore that thing all the time. He carried a football with him all the time,” Kelly said.

His recovery from his hip injuries also did not come as a surprise to his parents, as Kelly explained, “You can only do so much as a parent, and I think we did everything we could do. But the main thing is him, he’s always been a go-getter, he was coming back no matter what. There was just no way he was going to sit and not come back.”

And come back he did. Lozinski led the Spartans in all-purpose yards as both a junior and a senior. As Head Coach Troy Diffendaffer explained when he introduced Lozinski at the signing ceremony, “As a coach you love to have that athlete who is multi-faceted; Jake is one of those athletes.” Lozinski filled virtually every skill-position role – quarterback, running back, wide receiver, punt returner, kick returner, kicker, and punter – for a Berthoud squad that made back-to-back appearances in the state playoffs in Lozinski’s final two seasons.

“When you get that athlete who can do seven different things it sure makes my job as a coach a heck of a lot easier,” Diffendaffer said.

“I’d say I don’t have a favorite position, and I’d play wherever the team wanted me and needed me,” Lozinski said of his willingness to fill whatever role the team needed and explained the versatility he demonstrated no doubt helped catch the eye of college scouts. “If you’re going to be able to play wherever your high school team wants, in college they’re going to put you where they believe you can blossom the most. It just gave me a better chance since I proved I could play wherever the coaches wanted,” he said.

At Adams State Lozinski will pursue a course of study in nursing, hoping to one day become a pediatric nurse. He said it was the example set by his mother, herself a nurse, which helped steer him toward that career path. He also explained that, despite having a litany of offers and interest from schools all over the nation, the choice to play at Adams State was made with his family in mind, as it will be close to Berthoud, where he has lived his entire life.

“Berthoud raised me to be who I am now, and I can’t wait to take that to another level and show everyone else how special Berthoud is,” Lozinski said.