Lamb Encouraged To Be Selfish For Once

Dan and Erin Lamb have diligently instilled values into each of their three children.

“First and foremost, be respectful,” Dan Lamb says, adding “please,” “thank you,” “Sir,” “Miss,” are always required.

“We’re kind of a hardcore disciplined family that way where everybody contributes. We eat Sunday dinners together, that’s not an option. We’re a pretty close family in that way. But we’re also a busy family, so everybody has to be respectful of everybody’s time.”

So being selfish was not something that was preached much, at all really, but that’s exactly what they’re trying to get their middle child, Jack Lamb, to be when it comes to choosing a college.

The 2018 California linebacker narrowed dozens of scholarship offers down to five last month; Notre Dame, UCLA, Penn State, Washington and Oregon.

It’s been an especially exciting experience for a family that has always been huge into college football.

“It just goes back to childhood,” says Dan Lamb. “I just always grew up a fan of college football.”

Dan and his wife both grew up in New Jersey.

“The traditions of college football,” he continues. “The sounds of the game. For me, walking into a stadium in the NFL is just a different feeling. I’m a big New York Giant fan too, but there’s just a different feeling with college football. Honestly, there’s a whole different level of passion. I’m a pretty competitive, passionate guy. College football just suits me.

“It just seems like they fight harder and it means more to them.”

An older cousin went to Penn State, so that was Dan’s team growing up. But while his wife would also head to Happy Valley, her family grew up Notre Dame fans and most of them never shook their allegiances.

“They’re born and raised in Jersey City,” says Dan. “Irish-Catholics and that’s what you did. You rooted for Notre Dame. You’d go to church on Sunday and the last thing the priest would say was, ‘Go Irish!’

Irish Sports Daily Lamb with his parents.

“It would crack me up because if Notre Dame was playing Penn State, they would root for Notre Dame over Penn State and yet they had two Penn State grads in the room.”

But even Dan developed a respect for the Irish during his undergrad years.

“I can remember going to Penn State-Notre Dame games back when I was in college,” he says. “The Notre Dame fans and the Penn State fans are pretty similar. They were very gracious. You would actually see Penn State fans tailgating with Notre Dame visitors. It was just bizarre.

“That was one of the games you could remember with good fans and they weren’t all good fans. There were certain teams that would come in who weren’t such nice fans. Just classy, traditional programs that respected each other, played hard for 60 minutes and went to different bars at the end of the day.”

As a youngster, Jack always showed promise on the football field, playing middle linebacker from the age of seven while also standing out as a receiver.

“Jack was always one of those special kids,” his father says. “He always found himself in the right place at the right time. He was a kid who always made big plays at the end of the day.”

His eighth-grade squad made it to the Pop Warner national championships, which was aired on ESPN and the announcers appreciated the name, referring to Jack as “Jack Ham” or “Jack Lambert” as he shined on both sides of the ball.

“As a parent, you take a step back and say, ‘Well, I’m biased. He’s my child, but of course, I think he’s great,’” Dan remembers. “But enough other people around you would always compliment Jack. He played on some good teams too, so it wasn’t like Jack was the only one. He wasn’t always the best player on the team. There were a lot of good players on our team.”

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Still, Dan didn’t “know” Jack was destined to be in the position he’s in now.

“I hoped,” he says.

Jack’s first Division-I scholarship offer came from Montana State.

“It was like, ‘OK, this is great. He’s on the radar,’” his father recalls. “A week or two later, he got Cal-Berkeley. Now, it’s like, ‘Oh my God.’ You’ve got a Pac-12 school that just offered your son a full-ride scholarship. That’s when it hit me that there was some real interest for Jack’s talents.

“The rest has kind of been a blur to be honest with you. There were days when he was getting three offers. There was a 48-hour period of time when he got eight offers from big schools.”

But as always happens, the shock eventually wears off and is replaced with the realization that there’s a monumental decision that needs to be made. Jack sat down with his father and made a list of factors that were important to him.

“There are 12 things for academics and there are 12 things for football,” Dan says. “They’re things like ‘Gameday Atmosphere’, ‘Head Coach’, ‘Linebacker Coach’, ‘Defensive Coordinator’, ‘School Spirit’. That’s really important to him.

“Academically, do they have a good Business school? Do I like the campus? Do I like the geography? Do I see myself being in this place for four years? As I look around at the student body, do I like what I see? Are people wearing the school’s sweatshirts all over the campus or are they not into it? We’ve been to campuses where, it’s kind of crazy, but they don’t seem that spirited.”

Jack’s Great Oak High School team regularly has several thousand fans at their games and he enjoys playing in that kind of atmosphere.

“He likes that everybody is dressed in their colors,” his father says. “There are three mascots on the field, the band playing.”

As he did his research, Jack would give each school a score of 1 to 10 for each category.

“That’s by far not the only thing he’s using to evaluate, but it helped him quantify what was important to him,” says Dan.

He’s also enjoyed meeting with various college coaches. Jack loves talking scheme and his father wouldn’t be surprised to see him go into coaching when his playing career is over. As an 11 and 12-year-old, he enjoyed the play-calling aspect of Madden video games as much as anything.

“He’s in there saying, ‘I can’t believe they’re running this. I’m going to switch my defensive scheme to do this,’” his dad laughs. “I’m going, ‘What are you talking about?’ He would actually use video games to study schemes. It was entertaining to watch.”

Jack has always been a huge fan of football, but would much rather play the sport than watch it.

“When he watches it, he watches it differently I think,” says Dan. “I watch it for more entertainment reasons. He’s looking at it and seeing what’s working and what’s not working. It’s been fun to watch. It’s very rewarding when you have a kid and you see and feel their happiness. Football makes him happy, it really makes him happy.”

After he got about his 30th scholarship offer, his father asked him if there was any other school he wanted an offer from that he hadn’t received yet and Jack said he had all of the offers he needed.

“He had a list of schools before we started this and we ranked them from 1 to 20,” his father says. “He has every school on his list that he wanted.”

And now that Jack’s in decision-making mode, for the first time – and likely the last time – in his life, his father is pleading with him to be selfish. Dan hopes his son understands why, but acknowledges it’s difficult for young people to truly understand what life is like as an adult.

“Once you become an adult and start to have responsibilities, you have a family, you have a wife or you have kids or you get a job and start working for a company, your decisions aren’t about you anymore,” Dan says. “They become about the company you work for, about your family. Everything you do, you have to consider other factors, other people and you have to honor that. To be a good person, I think those are the types of things you have to do.”

Dan says he and his wife have taught their kids not to be selfish, but this is an exception.

“I told Jack, ‘This is really the last major decision that you get to make where you get to be 100 percent selfish,’” he says. “This really is a decision that has to be a good fit for him.”

The fact that his parents went to Penn State shouldn’t be weighed into Jack’s decision at all, according to his father.

“That’s cool, but that shouldn’t have anything to do with it,” he says. “He shouldn’t feel bad if he doesn’t pick Penn State. That shouldn’t even matter. The fact that he has that opportunity is amazing enough, but it shouldn’t even come into the picture. It should be about what he wants to do. I think he struggles with that because he’s a people-pleaser.”

That also makes the process difficult as Jack has become close with many of the coaches who are recruiting him.

Irish Sports Daily Lamb during his visit to Notre Dame last month.

“He’s talking to them a lot,” Dan says. “I told him, ‘You can’t let that affect your decision. It’s important you like the people you’re going to go spend the next four or five years with, but you can’t feel bad about that.’ He will, I know he still will, but he has to make a selfish decision because it really is for him.

“I said, ‘Let’s say your dream comes true and you get drafted into the NFL, you don’t get to pick. They pick you and then you go wherever they tell you to go.’ I told him, ‘This is the last time you get to be selfish.’ I really hope he approaches it that way. It sounds funny coming from a dad telling your kid to be selfish, but I really think he has to make a selfish decision in order for it to be the right decision for him.”

Jack is hearing the same thing from his coach, Mike Barney, who has been coaching him since he was seven.

“Jack will share stuff with Mike that he won’t share with me I’m sure because they have a different relationship,” says Dan. “I can tell you that Mike and I are on the same page there and Jack knows that because we’re not playing both sides here.

“Because it’s not just coming from me, it’s coming from his coaches and to be very honest with you, even some other coaches have told him the same thing.”

UCLA head coach Jim Mora pointed to his own son’s decision to head across the country to play lacrosse at Maryland.

“I think Jack has seen and heard it enough, but to make sure he stays on course, he gets that speech about once a week,” his father laughs.

A polite, mature young man, Jack isn’t necessarily the kind of kid who loves the attention that comes with the process either.

“If you would talk to his coaches right now, they would tell you that Jack is truly embarrassed, embarrassed by all of this attention,” his father says. “He’s stayed humble, he’s used his recruitment to help other guys on the team.

“When coaches come see him. Let’s say it was a school he didn’t really have a lot of interest in, he would walk the coaches around to other players on his team to give them the opportunity.”

Irish Sports Daily Lamb with his sisters.

Dan is quick to push the credit for the way Jack, Jack’s older sister Meghann and his younger sister Grace are toward his wife.

“A huge part of the kids’ success has been my wife,” he says. “She made a decision that she was going to stay home and raise the kids. I’ll tell you what, she’s a warrior. My kids have never missed a practice for anything. They’ve never missed anything. She’s really taught them how important it is to go to practice, to be at every practice.”

In eighth grade, Jack suffered a foot injury that sidelined him for six weeks.

“He went to every practice,” Dan remembers. “As a 13-year-old to go to every practice, to me that says something. You’re with the team whether you’re hurt or not hurt. He just didn’t want to miss any of that stuff.

“All of my kids understand if you’re on a team or you start something, you finish it. You don’t quit. You’re not more important than anybody else on that field or on that court. You have to be a team player and you have to be respectful. My kids all have great work ethics. We’re kind of fans of work hard/play hard, but you’ve got to work hard first. I’m super proud of them. They all work really, really hard. All three of my kids are above A-students.”

Dan says it’s tough to put the pride he has in his son into words.

“While I’m super proud of the player he is and the athlete he is and the student he is, I have to be really honest, I am so much more proud of how he’s handled all of this,” he says. “It’s just who he is and I love that about him. Gosh, I hope he stays that way.”

Earlier this month, Jack was in Oregon for The Opening, where many of the highlights were capped with individual celebrations and jawing.

“That’s great, but you don’t need to talk, you don’t need to do backflips,” Dan says before laughing and adding, “Let’s be perfectly clear, at 6-4, 224, he can’t do a backflip.

“At the end of the day, that’s what I’m most proud of; not only who he is, but how he’s been able to stay that same way.”

Jack hopes to reach the highest level of the sport, but knows he’s got a long way to go before doing so. But he’s already looking forward to making the most of the stage he’s given on the next level to help others.

“One of the things he’s looking forward to in college is the opportunity to give back to some of these kids,” his father says. “A lot of these programs do a really nice job of taking care of youths and Jack looks forward to that. He loves that.”

That goes back to an experience he had as an 11-year-old.

Dan brought his son to Arizona to see the Cardinals play the Dallas Cowboys and was able to score pre-game field passes through his company.

Growing up a Giant fan like his father, there was no way Jack was going to be rooting for the Cowboys, so he was representing the home team by wearing a Larry Fitzgerald jersey.

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During warm-ups, the All-Pro wide receiver spotted Jack and his jersey and tossed him a football. After catching it, Jack was getting ready to throw it back before Fitzgerald motioned for him to keep it. Already in awe, Jack and Dan later learned from team personnel that nobody could remember Fitzgerald giving a kid a ball before.

When he returned to California, Jack wrote Fitzgerald a letter thanking him.

“In the letter, Jack says, ‘If I ever make it to your level, I’m going to do what you did for me,’” his father recalls.  “‘Every kid should have a chance to feel like you made me feel.’

“I’m super proud of how Jack has been a leader and the young man he’s become handling all of this, if he stays like that, he’s truly going to be a very special person, player and someone other kids and athletes can look up to.”