Marlin Klein was on a bus about two hours outside of Atlanta, heading towards rural northern Georgia, when it really hit him that the next few years of his life would be almost nothing like the 16 that had preceded them. Hailing from Cologne, Germany, Klein was embarking on a journey that he hoped would help define him. It was one in which he knew everything — from the language to the landscape to the culture — would be completely foreign to him.
It was nerve wracking. It was difficult. But more than anything else, it was exactly what he wanted.
“The first couple of months were rough,” the junior tight end told The Michigan Daily of his journey. “Once I hopped on that plane, it was all great and it was perfect. And then I landed in Atlanta, and I’m from the city back home in Germany, so I got on the bus and that’s when it kind of hit me. Two and a half hours later that’s when I realized, ‘Hey, I barely speak the language, I don’t really know anyone here, and I’m on my own now.’ But that’s what I wanted, so let’s go do it.”
Or as Chip Miller, Klein’s high school receivers coach at Rabun Gap, put it, cracking up:
“They fly into Atlanta right, then they drive two hours and when they pull up they’re like, ‘Where the hell are we?’ ”
For Klein, that was a good question. As a 16 year old sophomore in high school, both Klein’s physical presence in the United States and the fact that he was receiving attention from major U.S. universities as a football recruit would have been completely unpredictable for him and his family just a few years before.
In fact, Klein was just six years removed from watching his first football game — the 2013 Super Bowl — staying up until 4 a.m. to do so and coincidentally watching his future coach Jim Harbaugh take center stage. Watching that game, Klein had his first inkling that he might want to play football. But for a few years, he didn’t mention it. Then, he couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“I went up to my dad and just asked him, ‘Hey Dad, I really want to do this,’ ” Klein said. “And fortunately enough, he knew one of the coaches at the Cologne Crocodiles. … So he ended up taking me to one of the tryout practices, and the coaches came up to me and told me I had a chance to be really good at it.”
And it wasn’t long before the belief that Klein might be really, really good, was taken seriously. As he rolled through the club ranks in Cologne and established himself as a talented receiver, his youth coach David Drane connected him with Gridiron Imports, an international showcase in front of American high school coaches run by former NFL defensive end and first round pick Bjorn Werner, also a native of Germany.
“After practice one day (Drane) came up to me and said, ‘Hey I have a friend (Werner). He’s having a camp on Saturday. I’ll come and pick you up,’ not really giving me a choice,” Klein recounted. “I was like, ‘All right, whatever.’ ”
Unbeknownst to Klein, the coaches scouting him at that showcase already knew who he was, already wanted him at their programs and were essentially asking him to move to the United States. Klein was immediately sold, but his parents took a little more convincing.
“I went home and told my parents ‘Hey, I’m going to the U.S.,’ ” Klein said. “And they all looked at me crazy. I was like ‘No, I’m serious.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll talk about it.’ So the next week all the high school coaches started hitting me up and sending me emails, and that’s kind of when we realized that this might be real.”
Then, just a few months later and two and a half hours north of Atlanta amid the Appalachian Mountains, it was actualized. For the first few months, Klein went through his growing pains, clinging to Google Translate, adjusting to an environment where football wasn’t a “twice a week after school” topic and navigating a new academic environment on his own for the first time.
Even while Klein worked through the adjustment period, his on-field talent was apparent to his coaches right away. He could run, he could catch, he could defend and — according to his receivers coach Miller — he could even punt.
“He’s very athletic and he’s hard to miss, you can’t snap it over his head,” Miller joked of the 6-foot-6 Klein.
But his head coach at Rabun Gap, Joseph Sturdivant, took a blunt approach to developing Klein’s raw talent.
“When you’re the best player (in Germany), everybody’s telling you how great you are, like ‘Oh, you’re so good you can just go to America and play college football,’ ” Sturdivant told The Daily. “Then you get a guy like me that’s like, ‘I’m gonna tell you the truth brother, you’ve got a long way to go. You don’t understand the game and you don’t know what you don’t know.’ ”
Under Sturdivant and Miller, Klein had to set out learning the language of football at the same time as he was using Google Translate to get through his classes. According to Miller, there was some disagreement among the Rabun Gap coaches as to whether or not Klein would be able to learn the game quickly and fully enough to blossom into an effective college player.
Sturdivant challenged him to perfect the nuances of the game and learn it completely. He told Klein the truth — that he had a long way to go. And Sturdivant told him that he’d have to improve if he actually wanted to be a contributor in college
He was hard on Klein, and pushed him accordingly. But instead of relenting or complaining, Klein took it in stride and progressed through his three years at Rabun Gap, growing from that pressure. He matured as a player and refined his skills, catching game winning touchdown passes and playing a major role in Rabun Gap’s 2021 State Championship.
“He’s tough,” Sturdivant said of Klein. “It’s a really hard thing to do to leave your family behind — you’ve gotta have something about you right? That takes courage to go off to chase your dreams and then get to the U.S. and some coach is telling you that you’re not that great and you’ve gotta get better. But he’s got that personality that he can absorb it, and he’ll listen.”
By the end of his senior year, Klein had grown into the caliber of player that received offers from Michigan and Georgia. He was again offered the chance to uproot his life to chase his dreams, and given that choice, he chose Ann Arbor.
“I remember him coming back and talking about how much (Michigan) reminded him of Germany,” Miller recounted. “And I kind of knew then that Georgia was in the rearview mirror.”
***
While much of Klein’s journey in football and throughout the past five years of his life has been an individual endeavor, it’s also very apparent in talking to him that his story both would not have been possible without his family, and is in part done for his family.
Without his family paying for flights, his parents’ willingness to send their eldest child 4,000 miles away and his siblings’ sacrifice of spending years without their older brother, Klein is certain that he wouldn’t be where he is today.
“When people ask me ‘Hey, how’d you do it?’ the first thing I say is my parents,” Klein said. “Just giving me that opportunity to go off and chase my dreams. When I first left we didn’t know I was going to go to college, we didn’t know what was going to happen. So just them taking that risk and believing in me and always supporting me, that’s been one of the biggest blessings of my life.”
Recognizing what his family has given to him, Klein’s goal now is to return the favor. He wants to play in the NFL, and be able to bring his siblings to the U.S. and give them the same opportunity that they gave to him. His family still may not understand why exactly he loves football the way he does, or what about the sport it was that convinced him to move away to pursue it, but they have no questions as to the depth of his commitment. That’s a commitment that Klein believes will pay off — for all of them.
“I think those seven or eight years without them, we’ll probably forget about it when we spend the next 50, 60, 70 years together here after moving them over here.”
***
After two years playing behind junior tight end Colston Loveland and current NFL tight ends A.J. Barner and Luke Schoonmaker, Klein finally earned his opportunity this season.
Even in a year in which the Wolverines have struggled, he’s shown bursts of who he could be. He ranks third on the team in receiving yards and receptions, and has been a key component of a passing offense that is still struggling. Even starting at Michigan and having played for Harbaugh — who coached the first football game he ever watched — Klein still feels that he’s learning the game, and he still feels that he’s got a long way to go.
But along a path that’s already taken him across the Atlantic Ocean, forced him to learn a new language and immersed him in a new culture, perfecting the language of football is just another step in a long journey.
The post Learning English and football at the same time, Marlin Klein’s 4000 mile journey to Michigan appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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