Sometimes in life, it’s the most ordinary and unassuming people who turn out to be anything but. This seems to be exactly the case for 32-year-old Jason Shepherd, who is a thoroughly normal guy in every regard except for one: He apparently knows a ton about local high school football and gets really into it.
Wow. Though Shepherd may appear completely average to the naked eye, it seems he also leads a shadowy second life.
While Shepherd might come across as a regular guy with an average job, healthy social life, and no obvious red flags, the truth is that he spends an inordinate amount of his free time watching and analyzing the varsity football team of his hometown, Catonsville West High School, attending each and every game with a scorebook and a headset tuned into the local radio broadcast. Though he has no relatives on the team or any personal connection to the school, Shepherd nonetheless begins tracking player scouting reports and online prep rankings months before the season even starts, dedicating as much fervor to the pursuit as typical football fans do their favorite NFL teams.
“Sometimes he’ll meet up with us at a bar on Friday nights and casually mention that he came straight from the Hilltoppers game as if it’s perfectly normal for a man in his 30s to spend his weekends watching teenage boys play sports,” says longtime friend Devin Simmons, noting that Shepherd will even go early to watch the JV games. “He goes to the games with a little thermos full of coffee and sits up in the bleachers with all the other old men who go to high school football games. He knows all the players’ names and can tell you which ones have a chance to make it to the NCAA, and he’ll sometimes reference articles from websites like MaxPreps as if they’re just normal ESPN articles or whatever.”
“It’s pretty weird,” he added.
Though friends insist that they don’t think Shepherd is a pedophile or anything like that, they remain perplexed as to how a respectable, socially competent man of his age with no mental health issues could be so passionately invested in a teenage sports league he has nothing to do with. Making matters even more confusing is the fact that Shepherd didn’t even play football himself back in high school, which would seem to be the only valid explanation for why a grown man would commit so much time and energy to such a bizarre hobby.
Wow. It just goes to show that no matter how ordinary and put-together a person may seem to be, you never know what kinds of strange and even horrifying things they’re doing when no one else is watching.
