FSU Baseball Coach: “Finest young man I’ve ever known… Is a good person.”

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Longtime FSU baseball Coach Mike Martin held a baseball coaching clinic in Cherry Hill, NJ in February of last year.  During his clinic he had a segment where he discussed college athletes who would like to play multiple sports and how some colleges won’t allow it. He went on to explain the benefits of it and how it has turned out players like Russell Wilson and Jameis Winston.

A source who attended the clinic gave Bucs Report the following recorded excerpt of Coach Martin discussing his relationship with Winston:

“Contrary to what you may have read in the paper, that is one of the finest young men I’ve ever known. If I went upstairs and texted him, he’d text me back in 5 minutes… He’s a friend. So much mess was written about him that was untrue. That is a good person. One of the best team leaders I’ve ever had.”

Coach Martin had nothing to gain by saying what he said at the clinic that day. He was just simply talking through his experience with the Buccaneers QB. It was Coach Martin uncensored, if you will.

Throughout the early years of an athlete’s career, coaches are sometimes the people that know them best, especially if the player is one of the leaders on their team. That seems very much to be the case here.

A lot can be said in front of a camera or behind a podium to spin a story a certain way to protect your players, but what is said away from the stage lights is where you find out what is truly going on. That cold day in New Jersey, people got a glimpse of it.

Granted, there has been a lot of bad press on Jameis Winston that seems incriminating, starting from his days at FSU with the alleged rape accusation then all the way to the start of his pro career when he was suspended for breaking the NFL’s personal conduct policy during the Uber incident.

In the age of smartphones and social media, limitless information is quite literally at our fingertips. The trouble we as a society have is the ability to sift through the false and keep the true. Because of this, society is guilty every day of forming opinions of those in the spotlight with incomplete information. Could the court of public opinion have been judging Winston wrong all these years?

What accusations and bad press are true or false in each one of these incidents may never truly be known. There is, though, one reputable, long-time coach vouching for Winston’s character, and that man is Coach Mike Martin.

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