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GOLD & BLACK ILLUSTRATED VOLUME 25, ISSUE 4 42 receiver at Cerritos in Norwalk, Ca- lif., so he seized it. Even if it meant a tougher road. Literally. Where Young lives in L.A., it's about a 45-mile car ride to Cerritos. But Young doesn't have a car. So he took two buses and a train to get to school each day. That daily trek is at least 90 minutes, usually two hours on the way home. Young uses the time to do home- work, listen to music, think. And there's a lot to think about: He has big dreams. "It's just a necessity for what I'm after, trying to reach a goal," he said. "There's junior colleges around my house that are much closer, but I felt like Cerritos was where I was going to get the biggest opportunity to get close to my dreams. In order to so- lidify my future and make sure ev- erything is going toward my future and my dream, I have to make sure I'm making sacrifices in order to get there. It's not the best (situation), but it's something that I'm willing to do in order to get what I want." Young put the same determination into developing as a receiver. He came to Cerritos "very raw," recruiting coordinator Tom Caines said, but showed a willingness to work and be coached. Young said he'd stay after practices with the quarterbacks to study coverages and run route trees and then go home and run routes by himself. In his first season, he was bur- ied by more experienced players on the depth chart and had lim- ited opportunities. By Year 2, though, Young was a differ- ent player. "He just realized he could physically dominate people because of his size and speed," Caines said. "And of course his confidence, as soon as you start making some plays, your confidence starts to develop. He just believed that he could make ev- ery play." Young pointed to two games his sophomore season when he realized, "I can play with the best of them." The first was against Fullerton, a college he says wanted him to play safety, and the other against rival Ventura. In back-to-back games in the third and fourth weeks of the sea- son, Young had 11 catches for 279 yards and three touchdowns. He caught short passes and made guys miss to rip off 20-yard chunks, but he also raced for deep balls, getting a 48-yard touchdown, a 50-yard catch and a 70-yard touchdown. By season's end, he had reg- istered five 1 0 0 - p l u s - y a r d g a m e s a n d h a d at least a 25-yard catch in seven games. "There was a point early in the season where I was getting a lot of man coverage and teams were trying to press me a lot, but after a couple 100-yard games, a couple 150 games, they started to back off so I stopped seeing that as much," Young said. "They started playing off trying to protect deep, and I started getting a lot of double coverage. "But it still didn't work out (for them) in the end." Though he's had a bit of success, Young knows he's not a fin- ished product. He points to want- ing to improve his feet, his hands, his route-run- n i n g , his speed and his strength. He said he wants to be the "com- plete package." He vows he will work for that to hap- pen. He knows Purdue brought in Mahoungou and already has DeAnge- lo Yancey and Gregory Phil- lips at the X spot, but he's happy about that. "I'm just one of those guys who loves to compete, whether I'm on the good end of it or the bad end, there's nothing wrong with competition," he said. "I had other opportunities to go to other schools, but I felt I wanted to go where the biggest competition Despite a late start to playing football while growing up in France, Anthony Mahoungou has used a tireless work ethic to quickly develop as a receiver. Dennis Gallegos