“Why give up what you have?” asked David Young, 36, a Sgt. 1st Class in the Army, who knows about packing up his belongings after multiple overseas deployments. “You have a family in D.C. You have friends and networking. There’s no reason to leave. Wherever you go, you’ve got to start over, so why not start over in a place where you’re already established?”



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Young’s hurt feelings aside, the advice made sense. So about six weeks later, Young picked up his security pass from CSN Mid-Atlantic and started working three nights a week, from 3 to 11, as an entry-level television network staffer. He has logged game tape and worked with video editors. He has sat in on sales meetings and worked on show rundowns. After two weeks, he even worked up enough nerve to ask director of studio programming Frank Crisafulli whether it’d be okay if he took a lunch break.

“I said, ‘Sure, you can go to lunch,’ ” Crisafulli said. “We had laid out everything for him, and maybe we forgot the lunch part.”

“No one ever said anything, so I just wouldn’t eat at all,” Young said. “I would eat before I came and eat when I got home. Saved money.”

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Young doesn’t consider himself retired from football, and is hoping to play a seventh season this fall. He still works out for two-and-a-half hours every morning, and he’s heard about some NFL interest over the past few weeks, although he hasn’t fielded any offers. If he got an offer, he’d take it; “I could get called right now and be on a flight,” Young said.

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In the meantime, he has been thrown into the life-after-football deep end. He takes a slower route to Bethesda instead of the Greenway or Toll Road in order to save money. He logs highlights from NBA playoff games — “that’s the lowest-on-the-totem-pole kind of job,” CSN producer Adam Wise said. And he wears his CSN polo shirt around an office filled with Redskins imagery. It’s like being turned away from a bar at last call, while being handed a photograph of a drink.

“Everything’s Redskins and Ravens here,” Young said. “I was that guy for so long, running around next to RGIII, next to Kirk [Cousins], shaking hands with Shanahan or Gruden in the pictures.”

It’s probably not breaking news that pro sports careers are brief or that their endings can be abrupt. NFL teams are never-stopping Metro buses, and every time a fresh-faced new passenger jumps aboard, someone gets tossed out the back. Young — who was signed out of Villanova as an undrafted linebacker — was never supposed to be a Redskins fullback for six seasons.

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Still, he wasn’t ready for it to end. After his release, he said he would have stayed with Washington for the minimum, that he might have run the whole way from Leesburg to Ashburn to sign a new deal. It wasn’t the money that stung; it was the sense that he wasn’t wanted. It was Gruden in his office, telling Young, “I think you’re a hell of a football player,” and then adding “but….”

“I mean, that was the most disheartening thing I think I’ve ever heard,” Young said. “For someone to tell you that we’re going to move on from you — I see why players go into a situation where they’re stressed and just don’t know what’s next. Because I’ve been playing football forever.”

Young, though, wasn’t just playing football in Washington. He had done weekly live-streamed broadcasts of his own “radio” show (on location at Hooters!), and then weekly appearances with NewsChannel 8 for two more seasons. He networked like a star, befriending a host of CSN employees, among others. He annually finished at the top of the Redskins’ community service leader board — inspired, he said, by Alfred Morris’s example. He even headlined a fundraising golf tournament for the National Kidney Foundation, despite not playing golf.

“That’s how I got my name, and I’m perfectly fine with that,” he said of his community work. “However you get in good with the fans, take advantage of it.”

He also became close with CSN’s Eric Shuster, the behind-the-scenes wizard of Washington sports. Even before his release, Young had talked with Shuster about trying to do offseason work for the network. He was thinking, like most ex-athletes, about being on-air. Shuster told him to get in touch with CSN Mid-Atlantic President Rebecca Schulte, who said she wanted Young to first learn the business. “Hey, I’ll do whatever it takes,” he responded.

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After his brother convinced him not to leave Washington, Young soon started the CSN gig, getting paid a modest hourly rate to explore parts of the television world he had never seen. His initial struggles with video editing, he said, made him want to cry all over again, while the behind-the-scenes drudgery made him want to shake the hand of every media member who covers the Redskins.

Having an athlete in the CSN newsroom is nothing new, from frequent guest appearances to “externships” with current players. Young’s approach, though, was a bit different.

“He legitimately wants to come in and learn the business, and it’s actually really inspiring to see a guy who doesn’t want any special treatment, who just wants to be one of the people working here and learning the craft,” Crisafulli said. “He has been as advertised. He just wants to learn.”

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So yes, despite what Gruden told him, Young is still living in the same Leesburg home. (And yes, he later regretted cutting off his cable.) He hasn’t told any of his former teammates what he’s doing, and he said his job is actually distracting him from obsessing about the future.

“I know I can still play, but there’s 1,600 guys that go through training camp every year that go home and feel the same way that I did,” Young said. “I can’t say what I’ll feel like in September if I’m not playing, but I’ve kind of come around a little bit.”

His brother, meantime, is preparing for a fifth deployment in the fall. He has to pack up and leave home yet again. His little brother doesn’t. That’s what David Young told him.