Dec 9, 2017 5 min read

As the Trinity North youth football team gathered at the goal line for a race several years ago, Nick Welsh remembers the inquiry he made to his coach about sprinting with the quarterbacks and running backs.

Welsh, admittedly a chubbier child growing up, toed the line with the linemen, with the coach chuckling in the background after offering him a deal.

“He told me that if I could beat all of them in this race, then he would give me a chance in the backfield,” Welsh vividly remembered one of his first football practices.

“I cooked them all.”

Years later, after suffering what could have been a career-ending injury, transferring schools, playing second fiddle to bigger and stronger running backs and questioning whether football was the fun game he dreamed about playing or just cruel and unusual punishment that ignored his hard work, Welsh ran around, over and past players this fall to be named the Observer-Reporter Football Player of the Year.

Welsh, now a senior at Washington High School, led all WPIAL classifications in rushing with 2,324 yards and 32 touchdowns. That’s the third-most in Washington County high school football history.

“I’ve always been short,” Welsh admits of his 5-8 size, a few of those inches added with the way he styles his hair.

“You’re short. You’re short. You’re short. That’s all I hear. I don’t really care. An athlete is an athlete no matter what their size. If you’re an athlete, you will do everything in your power to go the furthest. For me, I know I’m normally the smallest one out on the field. But I never tell myself that I don’t have a chance.”

The chance Welsh earned to become a starter this year was one that was put in jeopardy several times since racing his way to the backfield as a fifth grader.

In the winter of his eighth grade year, Welsh, a wrestler at the time, failed to make weight and had to jump up to the next available weight class to wrestle at a tournament at Trinity High School when something went horribly wrong.

“I tried to pick up the guy and I cracked my L5 (vertebrae) in my spine,” Welsh said. “I had to wear a back brace for a year. I had to go through therapy. I couldn’t have any physical activity. I couldn’t do anything.”

He even had trouble with the simple task of walking up steps because of the excruciating pain.

“There were a lot of days when I would come home and just sit on the couch,” he said. “It sucked. I wanted to come home and run upstairs, but I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t go to Kennywood and ride roller coasters. I couldn’t be a kid.”

But after months of treatment and therapy, Welsh finally walked back between the white lines of the football field to only have his sophomore season at Trinity greeted with more disappointment.

After working hard to get back on the field, Welsh found himself doing more watching than playing on Friday nights.

“When I stepped on the field again for the first time, a sense of warmth came over me. I was back where I wanted to be,” Welsh said. “But when I went through that season and only got a handful of carries, my passion for football was dying.”

Welsh, however, transferred across town to Washington and found a fresh start in all aspects of his life before his junior year.

That’s when the sport gave something back to him that he desperately needed.

“I had to move schools to find that passion again,” he said. “I was going through a stage of my life where I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was almost at a point of depression. When I came to Wash High, I fell in love with (football) again.”

Welsh continued biding his time in the running-back-by-committee backfield the Prexies used last season, hoping to eventually work into the starting spot for his senior year.

From speed camps to workouts, Welsh was out to prove what others doubted … that he wasn’t too short and that he did belong in the starting backfield.

Not considering himself a starter until finally getting the call Week 1 against Charleroi, only 17 handoffs in that game from sophomore quarterback Zack Swartz were all Welsh needed. He proved he belonged in the lineup. He ran for 308 yards and two touchdowns in his first game as the starting tailback.

Welsh continued to do the unthinkable, running for more than 100 yards in each of the Prexies’ 14 games.

He scored at least one touchdown in every game.

He finished with an average of 11.62 yards per carry and scored a touchdown an average of every six times he touched the football.

He had five games in which he scored at least three touchdowns.

And as Welsh tried to explain how he did it all this season, he just smiled at those who doubted him.

“All I needed was a few carries,” Welsh said of getting his opportunity. “You don’t need to be six feet tall and weigh a certain amount to be able to run the football. If we needed a first down, I was going to put my head down and get that first down.

“And the one part of winning the WPIAL championship I’ll remember most is seeing everybody run out onto the field. It was unbelievable. In that moment, we were winners. And this was a season that made up for all of those struggles.”