By Lee Pace
Jay Bateman looks back on his years in the 1980s growing up in the Richmond suburb of Glen Allen and lists the things he wasn't very good at: "Couldn't hit a curve ball. Didn't run very fast. Couldn't shoot 3-pointers. I was 5-9 on a good day, so I couldn't go down in the box in basketball," he says.
The position of linebacker on the football field, however, provided a haven for a kid with some brains and guts and a lot of drive. By the time he graduated from Hermitage High in 1991, he led a team in tackles that had three future NFL guys on its roster, one of them a linebacker named Jamie Sharper, who'd go on to a productive career at Virginia and then a decade with three teams in the NFL.