Five months ago, junior broadcast journalism major Ryan Doyal awoke from major ankle surgery with the knowledge that he would most likely never run at full speed again. Naturally, that’s when he decided to try out for a Division I football team and write about it.

At 24 years old, Doyal has had his share of unorthodox life events. In the six years since he graduated from high school, the Landsdale, Pa.-native climbed the CUTCO corporate ladder, backpacked through Europe, spent a year in Santa Monica, Calif., returned to the Philadelphia area for a year, and was accepted to the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Now, at 5 feet 9 inches and 175 pounds, this former soccer standout wants to try his hand – and surgically reconstructed ankle – at playing football for Syracuse University.

‘It’s going to hurt,’ said Doyal, who has never played organized tackle football. ‘I’m ready for it. These guys are all going to be bigger and faster and stronger and better than me. I’m ready to get my a** kicked.’

Doyal’s mother, Elizabeth, is a little less gung-ho about the prospect of her son getting injured.

‘I’m scared to death,’ she said. Elizabeth understands the potential long-term injury risks for any Division I football player, particularly for one with a bad ankle and a significant size disadvantage.

Doyal readily admits his athletic shortcomings and even shares them on the Internet. The extroverted junior is working on a book about his experiences in trying to make the SU football team, and writes a blog about it called ‘Hopeless Walk On.’

Since breaking his ankle and tearing two ligaments in a flag football game in July, Doyal has posted daily updates on the efforts to rehab his injury and get into playing shape in time for the 2010 season. Doyal said the prospect of losing his athletic abilities to an injury was what drove him to try out.

‘I felt like I had wasted something that was given to me,’ Doyal said. He feels that he misused his talents on soccer, a sport he said bores the crap out of him.

These days Doyal is completely focused on football. He has added 40 pounds of muscle to his frame over the last two years and works out every day with his roommate, Josh Hawley, a sophomore at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

‘He’s the motivator for us in the weight room,’ Hawley said. ‘He’s always trying to push us. He’s pretty determined.’

It took Doyal 24 years, several full-time jobs, a trip overseas and a cross-country move to find that determination.

The junior said he had no clear aspirations after graduating high school in 2003. With what he called a ‘messy’ situation at home after his parents’ divorce the year before, Doyal went to work full time selling knives for CUTCO, where he quickly learned that he was a natural salesman.

Soon he was promoted to a management position, and while all of his friends went to college, Doyal worked 90-hour weeks and earned a ‘comfortable’ salary.

Despite the money, Doyal quit after a year on the job. Burnt out from spending his life in a cubicle, he wanted to pursue greener pastures overseas. Less than a week after deciding to travel, he was in Europe.

‘At that point I was just fed up with what I was doing,’ Doyal said. ‘I had a bunch of cash, and I was like ‘I really want to see the world.”

Alone in an unfamiliar continent, then 19-year-old Doyal backpacked from Frankfurt to Munich, through Austria to Italy, where he visited Venice, Florence and Rome, then Southern France, Barcelona and Madrid. He then traveled back up the French coast to Paris, then Amsterdam, Rotterdam and, finally, Great Britain.

After three months, Doyal returned home briefly before moving to Santa Monica, Calif., to live with a friend. Over the next year he enjoyed the West Coast’s beautiful weather while attending a local community college and earning a comfortable living with a sales job.

Still, Doyal was not satisfied. He couldn’t just spend his life living comfortably on the beach. He moved back to Pennsylvania, where he enrolled at Montgomery County Community College and joined a flag football league. There he decided to pursue a career in broadcast journalism in the classroom as his passion for football grew on the playing field.

With newfound focus in his education – that semester he had a 4.0 grade point average – Doyal applied to Syracuse University.

So, without so much as visiting the campus, the 22-year-old community college student applied to SU – and got rejected.

After another semester at MCCC, Doyal applied a second time and was accepted to the school of his choice.

Now in his third semester at SU, Doyal is working tirelessly toward his goal of making the football team next season. He’s ready to try out, even if it means setting himself up for failure.

‘I’m not worried about the consequences,’ Doyal wrote in his yet-to-be-titled book while still on crutches. ‘I’m not worried about failing. I have nothing to lose except pride here. I’m going to go out and try to do something special. As soon as I can walk again…’

dafersh@syr.edu