Stalbird Finds a Championship Home at SDSU

@HuskerlandBob Sez: Thought we'd double down on national champion South Dakota State's Huskerland connection, publishing our 2017 feature on former Kearney star, and former Husker for that matter, Isaiah Stalbird. Isaiah was part of Kearney's state final football team and yesterday was second on the SDSU team in tackles as the Jackrabbits beat Montana for the FCS national title.

I decided to double down in a way, republishing Isaiah's feature which also included an addendum regarding his accepting a preferred walk-on offer from the Huskers. He transferred to SDSU in 2020 and has played linebacker and safety for the national champions. Here goes...

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@HuskerlandBob Sez: Kearney's Isaiah Stalbird recently accepted an offer to become a member of Nebraska's preferred walk-on Class of 2018. We had a chance to catch up with him yesterday, and as part of this refresher course we will catch you up on how this whole Huskers football thing came to be. Plus, it's another chance to make a Sara Bareilles reference, though that didn't go over so well last fall...

* "Ultimately what (Coach Scott) Frost told me was he could see me playing down there, that I would be a guaranteed a spot on the team and we would go from there" remembers Kearney all-stater Isaiah Stalbird of his NU preferred walk-on offer. "I wasn't completely sold after the (walk-on event at Memorial Stadium) but once I had a chance to think it throught I was sure this was the right decision for me. Becoming a Husker is every Nebraska boy's dream."

Speaking of dreams, Stalbird has had some sort of dream sequence since last fall, first starting and playing outstanding football for a Kearney team that won its unbeaten way into the Class A title game, playing at Memorial Stadium in the state final, then accepting an offer to get to do the same thing for the next four or five years.

Coach Frost also reinforced the idea Stalbird's walk-on standing could convert to a scholarship in time. "He told me it was there for the taking and said I would have the chance to earn it," says Isaiah, who also gives the University of Wyoming staff a great deal of credit for the way it recruited him. Until Frost and his staff came along, Stalbird was going to become a Cowboy.

"I am really excited and I am like the rest (of the walk-ons), as a Nebraska kid you take a lot of pride in the program. I want to be there when we turn things around."

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What follows is the original feature story written about Isaiah, one that was published back last November just ahead of the Class A championship game:

* Millard North’s is a great football program, a state championship football program. You beat Millard North, you’ve done something. Like Sara Bareilles once sang, even I know that.

Back in September Kearney beat Millard North and beat ‘em good, 42-0, and it was at that moment Isaiah Stalbird knew this whole thing was for real. His Bearcats were a good football team, maybe a great football team, maybe even a state championship football team.

We all get to find out next Tuesday night if this story has a happy Bearcats ending when unbeaten Kearney (12-0) faces Omaha North (11-1) in the Class A state championship game to be played at Memorial Stadium. Kickoff is scheduled for 7:15 p.m.

“That game was so fun and that’s when I thought we could make it work. That game gave us an idea of how could we could be,” says Stalbird, who is a 6-foot-tall, 195-pound senior wide receiver and strong safety. “Shutting them out meant a lot to us.”

Hello to high and dry.

How good Kearney could be, as it turns out, is very. Especially on defense, where Stalbird has piled up 63 tackles, three fumble recoveries and a couple of interceptions. His contributions have been at the center of a season-long defensive masterpiece spun by the Kearney defense.

Kearney has been a good football program, a top ten program, for many years, even winning a state title back in 2006. This year’s push toward greatness really took root last summer, says Stalbird, even if the Bearcats did only return two starters on offense and one on defense. One.

“When you go back to the summer we were really committed to working hard and we were committed to each other,” says Stalbird. “You could see it in the 7-on-7s, in the weight room and even after our team workouts, when a bunch of us would go back out and do our own workouts. As a team we have always been pushing each other and we have great leadership on this team. Those are big reasons why we are where we are.”

Which is on the doorstep of a possible state championship. That’s quite a turn of events for Isaiah, who’s had quite a life’s journey to this point in his young life. He’s “always been into football, even when I was four or five,” and he’d spend hours on his Game Boy playing Madden NFL, hoping one day to get to play football like that. See, Isaiah never had the chance to play youth football because his parents couldn’t afford it.

It wasn’t until junior high, when the school supplied the equipment that he got to play the game he’d love from a distance. Some of that ties into his early life where after being born in Chicago he “moved around a lot” before landing in Kearney, mostly because his adoptive parents had family in nearby Loup City.

After working his way through the Kearney football ranks he last season wound up with the chance to earn a starting position on defense. Things didn’t quite work out as he hoped, however, and Isaiah spent the rest of the season playing special teams with some spot duty on both offense and defense.

Flash forward to this season and not only has he proven to be a dynamite defensive back he’s also a big play receiver on offense, with 19 catches for team-best totals of 379 yards and seven touchdowns.

“After what happened last year I knew this was my last shot and I worked my butt off to make things happen. I think they are paying off now,” he says. And Isaiah? You are oh-so-right.

Off the field Isaiah is “into teenage things” like watching a lot of football, more video games, driving around town with his buddies and, well, eating. Oh yeah, and music. “I listen to all kinds of music. My family likes country music, so I listen to country music.”

Stalbird wants to play football at the proverbial next level and already has an offer to play defensive back at Wayne State, along with some interest from the University of Wyoming. Enough interest where Isaiah took an unofficial visit and fell in love with the place; Wyoming, one way or another, is at the top of his list.

As for a career Stalbird would like to pursue a career in medicine as a flight nurse, which is a position for registered nurses who are highly trained to administer all-encompassing critical care, emergency and pre-hospital care for patients of all kinds during rescue operations on board jet aircraft, propeller aircraft or helicopter. “I like helping people and that seems like a career where I could do that on a daily basis,” says Isaiah.

Ask him about Tuesday’s title game and you won’t get a blank stare at blank pages, and really is no easy way to say this, playing his final game with his Kearney football buddies makes it hard on him.

“It’s hard to believe this will be my final high school game. I have a lot of great friends on this team and I know that running out of that tunnel on Tuesday will be the greatest feeling in the world. We will be ready to play a good football game.”