When Shapen was a middle-school baseball phenom, he took a recruiting visit with Mississippi State. Back then, however, the newly revamped Dudy Noble Field had yet to be built.
“It was pretty different,” Ken Shapen told GenesPage.com over the phone. “It was a time when he was so young, and we weren’t talking much about football. At that time, there was no baseball field there. Just renderings.”
“We pulled out of (Starkville) and he was like, ‘Man, I am coming to State to play baseball.'” Ken said of Blake’s baseball recruiting visit. “He was young, but he left with the impression that he was going to commit to State and play for Andy down the road.”
One of those became true. Shapen is now a Bulldog, but it will be on the football field this fall instead of at The Dude.
Growing up, baseball had always come natural to Shapen, but there was something about football that scratched a different itch, according to Ken.
“It was a quicker, faster sport,” he said. “Football was always on the forefront and became more serious in the latter part of high school.”
Baseball was woven into the Shapen family. Blake’s older brothers Vaughn and Kyle both played the sport, while Vaughn played collegiately at Middle Tennessee.
“Since four years old, that is all we did,” Ken Shapen said. “We played like 62, 63 travel games one year. We were one of those crazy families and we lived through our kids playing sports.”
From a young age, Blake always wanted to do what his brothers were doing, even if it meant being a punching bag as the youngest sibling.
“We later found out they would put pads on (Blake) and run at him 100 miles per hour,” Ken added. “Who knows how many times he has been knocked out in the front yard that we don’t know about.”
Shapen was a candidate to get drafted out of high school, at Evangel Christian Academy, to the MLB. However, he had dreams of also playing college football.
