DeLaSalle's Drayton Carlberg: A football player in demand

For then 4-year-old Drayton Carlberg, the dream began to coalesce on Friday nights in the fall. Saturdays meant duck hunting, so the evenings before would often include a bonfire and a football.

"I would throw the football around with the family," Carlberg said. "I realized how much I loved football."

These days, he's loving the experience of being Minnesota's top interior line prospect and the subject of big-time national collegiate attention.

In diary excerpts collected for the Star Tribune, the defensive lineman for DeLaSalle wrote of trying on a Rose Bowl ring at Michigan State, tasting the best crab of his life in North Carolina and picking up a couple hundred Twitter followers after a visit to Nebraska.

Football always has been a centerpiece of life in the Carlberg household, where Drayton still can recall overshooting a new couch and crashing on a coffee table after laying himself out to catch a touchdown pass in the living room.

"I started playing tackle football in fourth grade," he said. "The town we were in [Cambridge] did not allow kids under fifth grade to play tackle football, even though I was bigger than any of those kids. Every night, my brother and I would play one on one against each other. My dad was all-time QB. Every kid has a dream to score touchdowns and that was our opportunity."

Carlberg now stands 6-5 and carries 280 pounds of muscle. His love for football still shows through on Friday evenings, where he displays the agility of one linebacker and the strength of three.

"I really like Minnesota and coach [Jerry] Kill and all of the coaches," said Carlberg, who has become a regular at TCF Bank Stadium over the past couple of years.

But Carlberg is not given to hasty decisions. An honor roll student at DeLaSalle, where he transferred after his family moved to Minneapolis from Cambridge before his sophomore year, he's weighing all of his options. He's committed to taking all five of the official visits allowed by NCAA rules and plenty of unofficial visits on the family dime.

Who could blame him? The future Carlberg envisioned for himself is within his grasp. Why rush it?

"I love the traveling," Carlberg said. "Being able to go to all of the different campuses, people I don't even know following me on Twitter after I get an offer from their area. It's pretty cool how invested some of these fans are."

At this point, he is still in the evaluation process.

Here are some excerpts from Carlberg's diary in recent months as he experienced what it's like to be a highly recruited football player:

"I've had a football in my hands since I can remember. I use to throw it up and pretend I was laying out for that amazing catch. One day, I was going for the winning touchdown in our living room, thinking I was going to land on the couch. But I overshot the couch and landed face first on the coffee table. Blood everywhere, but I made the amazing catch. My dad yelled down from upstairs and told me not to get blood on his new couch. I was always breaking windows or furniture. It was how I rolled."

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"The time that stands out most was at the University of Minnesota 7-on-7 tournament and it had nothing to do with football. I got to spend time with a little boy with a brain tumor. My brother Hunter and [teammate] Marquise Bridges and I saw his story on TV and decided we wanted to send him a message on his Caring Bridge site to let him know how brave he was. We invited him to hang out with our team at the tourney. This little boy has been through so much over the last six months but he never stopped smiling. All I could do was smile. This was all about letting him know how brave he is. [It's helped me] not to take things for granted. Things can be taken away at any time. "

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"Some of the best food so far has been at Nebraska. Being the big man I am, the quality and quantity of food was a little overwhelming, even for me. In North Carolina, I had really good crab, best I've ever had. We did have one bad fast-food meal down South. It was greasy and cheap. I don't remember what restaurant, but the whole family felt sick afterward."

• • •

"When you're being recruited, wherever you go, there's always attention on you. I had to be careful about what I said and did. After I came back from Nebraska, I had about 200 more Twitter followers, just because I went there."

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"Most schools roll out the red carpet for you. They like to give their visitors the best. At North Carolina, I got to ride all over campus in a golf cart. I didn't drive it, but they were taking us everywhere I wanted to go. When we were at Vanderbilt, one thing we kind of laughed about was this electric golf cart that they drove us around in. It was only about half-charged. It was going too slow, you could have walked faster than it ran. At Oregon, they have top-of-the-line everything because of Nike. It's not hard to impress people and show off when you have the best of everything."

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"Getting back to actually playing high school games is a great thing. It's definitely a relief. It's great to be back in your own bed after a long trip. The recruiting process is fine and all, but there's nothing like Friday night with your brothers from DeLaSalle."

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"I've got my list narrowed down to six schools: California, Minnesota, Michigan State, Oregon, Vanderbilt and North Carolina. I'm going to take an unofficial visit to Minnesota because it's so close. I'll take my five official visits to the other schools. Do I have a date set for making my decision? Not yet. I like them all."