Clements / Milby

Katy senior Michael Fuda is a legitimate two-sport star.  As football Michael Fuda, the mercurial wide receiver caught 62 balls for 1,399 yards in an all-state junior season. The Tigers focused on the run with an underclassman quarterback this past fall, but Michael still caught 44 passes for 738 yards in addition to wowing crowds across Greater Houston with his abilities as a punt returner.

As baseball Michael Fuda, he hit over .400 with a handful of homeruns and a score of stolen bases during the Tigers’ run to the state championship game in 2006. He is also a tremendous defensive second baseman and a leader on a team ranked No. 1 in the state and No. 3 in the country to start the season.

“He’s got more range than any kid I’ve ever seen at second base,” Katy head coach Tom McPherson said. “He goes from the other side of second base, really almost all the way to first base. Of course, when he’s on the base paths he’s a threat any time. He can just put the ball in play and beat it out. He’s a threat all the way around.”

Many modern-era high school athletes never get to understand the highs and lows of Michael’s path because they choose to focus on one sport over the others, but for Fuda, that was never an option. Asking him to give up football for baseball or vice versa would be akin to asking a parent to pick a favorite child and discard the others.

“I love both sports,” Fuda stated. “Whatever sport’s in season is the one I love. It’s really hard to choose.”

Fortunately for Michael, he won’t have to – at least not right away. He will get the rare opportunity to do both at the next level, signing a national letter of intent for football with the Rice Owls earlier this month. When he arrives on campus just a few miles from his home next August, the two sports will share him.

“It’s a great opportunity for me,” he said. “It’s a great education, for one thing, and that’s the most important. And then all that hard work I’ve put in, it’s worth something to me.”

How Michael handles the weight of playing two sports in college, particularly at a school as challenging as Rice, remains to be seen. Many of the athletes who try to double up on sports in college end up choosing one over the other eventually – often the sport in which he has the most upside as a professional. The workload is a monster, and eventually the athletes’ skill set falls behind his teammates in both sports because he is unable to focus on just one.

That dynamic has actually played out to some extent at the high school level for Michael. While he has never had trouble picking up right where he left off in football, he usually finds himself behind the eight ball on the diamond, particularly at the start of the season.

“In the beginning I’m really rusty,” Fuda explained. “Everyone’s ahead of me because I’ve just played a full season of football and haven’t really touched a baseball in so long. But with time, I catch up. It just takes a little while.”

Baseball is such a game of repetition and timing and the training of the muscles and the instincts to react the same way, again and again, in certain situations – perhaps more so than any other sport. And in that regard, Michael is likely behind some of the other position players around the state in terms of being a legitimate pro prospect out of high school.

“All the scouts who see him say he’s an athlete, he’s just kinda raw,” McPherson said. “He is a little bit, but he’ll refine it.”

Over the years, Fuda has given his coach every reason to have confidence in Michael’s ability to overcome. As a skinny sophomore, Fuda was a varsity starter and he struggled throughout the season – overmatched by more physical, experienced players. So he worked his tail off in the offseason, and despite trotting off to play football again in the fall, he came back with a vengeance in his junior season.

Now he stands on the precipice of a challenge that few before him have been able to handle. He will try to continue to be both football Michael and baseball Michael at a Division I university. According to his coach, he not only has the physical ability to pull it off, but he also has the intangibles.

“He’s a great all-around athlete, great student, great kid,” McPherson beamed. “He’s the kind of kid, if you had a daughter, you wouldn’t mind her going out with him.”