At the
Ventura County Star (Camarillo, CA):
(Please follow the link for the complete article. A very inspiring story. Bravo to the entire Judge family and to Jordan Morrison!)
Oaks Christian's Jordan Morrison is motivated to succeedThankful odysseyBy David Lassen (Contact)
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Jordan Morrison has followed a hard path to a good place, and he vows to make the most of the journey.
Virtually left to make his own way in the world since his freshman year of high school in Canada, Morrison has, with the help of a remarkable commitment from a local family, emerged as an extraordinary success story at Oaks Christian School, one reaching far beyond his success this year for the Lions football team.
... Football proved vital in another way: Through it, he came to know the family of Mount Douglas teammate
Chris Judge, whose mother, Margaret, had begun working on a documentary film following the members of Mount Douglas' football team.
... But after that school year, with Chris' father, actor and former University of Oregon football player
Christopher Judge, having completed filming of the "
Stargate" TV series, the family moved to Southern California. Morrison stayed behind, moving in with his mother, who was then out of the hospital, but coming south for a short summertime visit after the family settled in Oak Park and Chris had enrolled at Oaks Christian.
"They had come down here in June," says Morrison. "They had me come down and visit for a week in July. Right away when I was here, I fell in love with Oaks. I knew I wanted to go here, but I didn't think that would ever happen."
As it turned out, his mother's respite was short-lived, and early in his junior year, Morrison again found himself facing the prospect of hopscotching from place to place — which is when the Judges again stepped forward.
"Christopher came to me," recalls Margaret Judge, " like a month and said, ‘I want you to go to the school; I want you to see if we can get Jordan into the school.' I said, ‘It's not that easy! It's like the end of October. How do we do this?' "
By the end of that day, she says, her son had gone to the Oaks Christian admissions office, found out what the school would need to admit Jordan, and contacted Mount Douglas High to get his friend's transcripts. And Margaret called Morrison and told him they wanted him to come to California.
"When she said that," Morrison recalls, "I was like, ‘Wow.' I thought back to that week I visited here and said, ‘That's where I want to be.' I couldn't think of anywhere better in the world for me to be living right now."
For that week and, for five or six days before they got me here, I was like, when I can get my tickets? When can I get down here?"
...
"This is one of those great, really-makes-you-feel-good stories," says Oaks Christian athletic director Jan Hethcock. "The team embraced him, the school embraced him, the Judges obviously embraced him, and he has fit in absolutely wonderfully. He's going to get a tremendous education and get to play football in the Ivy League. It doesn't get a whole lot better than that."
Except, maybe, for the degree to which Morrison appreciates the chance he received from the Judges.
"I don't know what made them make the decision to say, ‘Come live with us permanently,' " Morrison says. "But they're great people and they've made huge sacrifices for me to be able to do something I always wanted to do.
"One of the reasons I feel that I have to be as successful as I can is so I can give back to them after I get out of college."
