Former White Rock-South Surrey Titans wide receiver Alex Lane is headed back to the United States.
The 18-year-old Semiahmoo Secondary grad – who, with his family, moved to the Peninsula from Kansas four years ago – signed a letter of intent last week to play football next season at Hastings College in Nebraska.
“It’s great. I’m pretty stoked about it,” Lane said last week of joining the Broncos program, which competes in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA).
“I’d been in contact with the coaches there for awhile, but only signed last week.”
For Lane – a member of the White Rock Titans midget team that won provincials in 2011 – the scholarship with Hastings will return him to his U.S. roots, to where he first took up the sport while living in his hometown of Chicago.
From there, he moved to Kansas when his father, White Rock blues musician Jimmy D. Lane, signed a a record deal with a Kansas-based label. The family moved to the Semiahmoo Peninsula when Alex was a teenager, after his father married a Canadian woman.
When they first moved here, Lane would travel across the border each day to go to school in Lynden, Wash. – “I wasn’t allowed to go to school in Canada yet,” he said – and he eventually moved to Surrey’s Sullivan Heights Secondary before settling in at Semiahmoo.
So it should come as no surprise, then, that the younger Lane is not overly rattled by change, and yet another move, this time to the American midwest.
“I’ve been through a few changes before,” he said. “So I’m used to it.”
Before visiting Hastings, he also had a firsthand review of the place from a trusted source – his older brother, Sebastian, 22, who is in his third year of pre-med studies there.
“He had a lot of really good things to say about the school, and he said it’s a really nice community,” Lane explained, adding that he has since visiting the city himself.
Lane graduated from Semiahmoo in 2013 and has spent much of the last year not only weighing his post-secondary options, but also improving his skills on the field. He’s been working with Game Ready Fitness, a Lower Mainland-based group that includes many current and former Canadian Football League players.
“I’ve been training with those guys and it’s been going well,” he said. “It’s been great up here, training there and with my coaches in White Rock the last three years. I’ve met a lot of great people.”
Lane chose Hastings over his other option – playing at UBC – in part, he said, because he was excited to return to a football-mad environment.
“The level of football in the States is just so high, and they really take it seriously,” he said.
“It’s just a really good atmosphere, and I’m looking forward to it.”
