MORGANTOWN - Early on in his journey to Division I college football, Nick Meadows identified the obstacles. He knew he wasn't going to overcome them, so he found a way around them.
"I played in high school at a small Class A school," said Meadows, a rising junior on West Virginia's football team who was a team captain, a three-year letter-winner and second-team all-state selection at Williamstown High. "I played linebacker, center and long snapper. I didn't have the size I needed to go play on the line or the speed to play linebacker.
"I went to a few camps my sophomore and junior years and realized I was special as a long snapper."
So Meadows changed the goals. He stopped shooting for a scholarship and a free ride at a big school and instead took aim at a plastic frame and a fabric rectangle target. Meadows would make his name and earn an invitation to join the Mountaineers by lighting up long-snapping camps.
"Not everyone can do it," he said. "It's a craft."
For Meadows, it began at a camp that was originally planned for Pittsburgh and was moved to Morgantown. Exactly how he did that day, Meadows doesn't remember. He was trying to learn, to keep up rather than catch up, and that was enough for that event.
But afterward, the head of the camp pulled Meadows aside.
"You looked really good," he said. "You need to keep doing this."
Meadows listened and went to work on a highlight tape, a necessity as simple as it sounds but more complicated than most might think.
"It was hard doing it and not putting my linebacker plays in there," Meadows said, knowing his attempt to open one door meant he was shutting another.
In the summer of 2012, not long before the start of his senior season, Meadows was asked to attend the National Invitational Scholarship Camp, the self-hailed largest kicking, punting and long-snapping camp in the country. The trouble for Meadows, no matter what it might mean to his future, was that the camp was in Wales, Wisconsin.
"It was going to be a lot of money to travel to Wisconsin for me and my family," he said. "We decided to go to another camp called the Eastern Showcase where there'd be a lot of good players training. We wanted to see what the competition would be like."
Meadows was named the top performer at the camp. He was the second-most accurate snapper when the contestants were asked to snap at the plastic frame holding the fabric rectangle. They'd get two points for hitting the target, one for hitting the frame and one for reaching a certain speed.
"That's when we said, 'Yeah, we need to keep going,' " Meadows said.
The family went to the national camp in Wisconsin and Meadows hit the target on 12 of 17 snaps. Kohl's Camps, the group that conducts the kicking, punting and snapping events, ranked Meadows No. 19 and gave him a five-star rating among snappers it saw at 105 events that year.
In February 2013, Meadows accepted an offer to join the Mountaineers as a preferred walk-on. He'd redshirt his first season and snap late in a 54-0 win against Towson in 2014. Last season, Meadows played the entire Liberty game when John DePalma was sidelined by back spasms and then finished the win a week later against Maryland when the game was in hand and DePalma's back started to act up again.
DePalma is gone now, hoping for a phone call after next week's NFL draft, and Meadows is ready to take over and give the position a different look with the same successful results. DePalma is 6-foot-5 and 252 pounds. He played tight end for his high school football team and scored 1,000 points for the basketball team and had the long arms to work like a slingshot and whip the ball back to the holder or the punter.
Meadows is 5-11 and 235 pounds. He's not as long. He has shorter arms. But he zips the ball to the destination with consistent speed and accuracy because Meadows again went around the obstacles that could have stopped him.
"I work a lot on my upper-body strength and my leg strength to make up for that," he said. "One thing you might not realize is how much long snappers use their legs just for the speed of the snaps. Most if it is in your legs and not just the arms.
"You go down, you grab the ball and bend your legs and shoot your butt up in the air and slide backward. If you snap the ball and you don't slide backward, you're not pushing through the ball, and you're going to lose a lot of speed."