After spending most of his life on the hardwood, Robert Bruce was approached by Angelo Wheeler, Park Crossing High School’s head football coach and athletic director, to try out for the football team. After he stepped onto the gridiron, Bruce fell in love.
“Before my senior year, I was a basketball player,” Bruce said. “I didn’t want to get hit and I didn’t like getting tackled. In my eleventh-grade year, Coach Wheeler told me to come play football. He was telling me every day to play football. One day he pulled me aside and asked me why I wouldn’t give it a chance. When I first started, I was a safety, but I made the switch to receiver and my friend Grant Dubose took me under his wing and helped me a lot.”
The honeymoon phase for this newfound attraction did not last long. Bruce brook his foot in the first game of his senior year and his high school career was taken away from him as quickly as it begun.
A lot of people would have given up after this happened. However, Bruce was determined to find a way to continue playing the sport he loved. He moved to West Point, New York to live with his aunt and uncle and started taking online classes with AUM. After a few months of working out and babysitting his two cousins, Bruce began looking for a change.
“I was in a depressed state because all of my friends from back home were playing ball so I started reaching out to coaches and got in contact with Coach Jones at Hudson Valley,” Bruce said. “Hudson Valley was about an hour and a half away from where I was staying and so it was really hard to drive back and forth to practice every day and for games. Coach Jones gave me an opportunity even though I didn’t have any film and so I make sure to stay in touch with him to show him my gratitude.”
In his first full year, Bruce made an immediate impact. The 5-foot-11 wideout caught 15 passes for 167 yards and a touchdown in just eight games as a true freshman. After two years away from home, he wanted to move back closer to home, Montgomery, Alabama.
Bruce created a plan to attend Troy as a regular student in 2022 and wait for walk-on tryouts in the following spring. However, his aunt Telma O’Neal sent his film and contact information to Miss Judy Morgan, the football team’s head secretary.
Miss Judy forwarded that message to wide receivers coach Gary Banks and Coach Banks got in touch with Bruce the day before Bruce moved back home. Bruce joined Troy’s football team in 2022 as a walk-on receiver and has helped the Trojans’ defense prepare for gamedays as a scout team wide receiver ever since.
“The journey has been wild since I got to Troy,” Bruce said. “Being a walk-on is really hard mentally. The mental aspect could really eat you up so I try to encourage all of the younger walk-ons to keep going and stay mentally strong. Sometimes, it feels like you are being overlooked and you get lost in the shadows of the scholarship players and it makes you think, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ In times like that, you just have to remain confident in yourself and faithful in God to keep you going. The journey here has been beautiful, and I have learned so much.”
Bruce has been a part of Troy’s football team that has won back-to-back conference championships and won over 10 games in both seasons. Bruce is one of the few returning members of last season’s roster and says that he hasn’t even thought about entering the transfer portal since coming here.
“I have always felt that there is something special about Troy,” Bruce said. “I feel like we can do some big things, and I think that Troy has built something big in the past two years. Right now, I am going to keep grinding and waiting for my time to shine. I don’t know what’s coming for me after I graduate, but I am hoping to either get involved in the criminal justice field.”
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