GULF SHORES, Ala. — 68 Ventures has announced the second class of recipients for its athletic scholarship program honoring senior walk-ons in college football, adding three more names to a recognition built for the players who do the sport’s hardest, least visible work.
This year’s recipients are Alabama defensive back Parker Sansing and two University of South Alabama players, Julius Kidd and Bradley Thomas. The three were selected for the award that the company created to honor walk-on players — those who earned their roster spots through tryouts and persistence rather than signed letters of intent, and who spend their college careers doing the unglamorous work that makes championship programs function.
The scholarship program was founded by Nathan Cox, a former walk-on at Alabama, who said the award is meant to celebrate the humility, toughness and relentless work ethic that walk-on players bring to their programs, often without the scholarships or spotlight given to their recruited teammates. Cox’s own path — arriving at Alabama without a scholarship and earning his place on the roster — is the template the award is built on.
By recognizing South Alabama players alongside a recipient from Alabama, the program highlights the walk-on tradition across the state’s college football programs, including the Jaguars’ own roster in Mobile. Walk-ons are a fixture at every level of Alabama football, from the SEC flagship in Tuscaloosa to the Sun Belt program on the Gulf Coast, and their contributions — scout teams, special teams depth, practice intensity — are among the least documented parts of the game.
What it means to be a walk-on
Walk-ons occupy a strange place in college football. They go through the same offseason conditioning, the same fall camp, the same practice schedules and game-day preparations as scholarship players, but they arrive without the financial aid, the recruiting attention, or the expectation of playing time. Most will never appear in a box score. The ones who last — who stay through four or five years of program demands without a scholarship — represent a commitment that the sport’s culture has always honored even as it overlooks them.
At programs like Alabama, walk-ons have long been part of the fabric of championship teams. They populate the scout team, simulating upcoming opponents so the starters are prepared; they fill out special teams units; and they anchor the practice-squad depth that keeps a roster functioning through injuries. Several walk-ons across college football history have gone on to professional careers, but for most, the reward is a senior day recognition, a letter jacket, and the respect of the locker room.
Scholarships that recognize them have proliferated in recent years precisely because their work so rarely draws compensation. A senior walk-on scholarship does something practical as well as symbolic: it converts the unpaid labor of a college career into financial support at the moment a former player is transitioning out of the sport and into the working world — often with student debt and no professional football future to offset it.
68 Ventures and the program’s design
68 Ventures, the Gulf Shores-based development company behind the award, has made the scholarship an annual tradition, with the second class building on the inaugural group honored the year before. The company’s founders and leadership include people with deep Alabama football ties, and the walk-on scholarship is the most visible expression of that connection — an award designed and funded by people who lived the experience it honors.
The selection of Parker Sansing, a defensive back at Alabama, places the program’s second class on the roster where the award’s founder walked on. Defensive backs rooms at SEC programs are among the most competitive in the sport, stocked with blue-chip recruits, and a walk-on who stays in that competition for four years is practicing daily against some of the best receivers in the country — an education in the sport that no scholarship player gets more of and none gets less from.
The two South Alabama recipients, Julius Kidd and Bradley Thomas, extend the award’s reach to Mobile’s own program. The Jaguars, who play their home games at Hancock Whitney Stadium on the university’s campus, have built their roster since the program’s 2009 debut with a mix of scholarship signees and walk-ons, the latter drawn heavily from high schools across south Alabama where players who were overlooked in recruiting get their last chance to play college football close to home.
Why the state’s programs share the tradition
Alabama’s college football programs are connected by more than competition, and the walk-on tradition is one of the ties. Auburn, Alabama, UAB, South Alabama, Troy, Jacksonville State, and North Alabama all carry walk-ons on their rosters, and the stories repeat across campuses: the in-state player who went to summer camp without an invitation, made the team, and spent four years earning a role. The players change; the structure is constant.
Honoring walk-ons across multiple programs in a single award — as 68 Ventures does by pairing an Alabama recipient with two from South Alabama — makes a statement about that shared structure. The humility, toughness and work ethic the award celebrates are not the property of any one program, and neither is the walk-on experience. A defensive back in Tuscaloosa and a linebacker or receiver in Mobile live versions of the same commitment.
For the recipients, the award’s value is both financial and reputational. Senior walk-ons rarely have highlights to show employers or graduate programs; a scholarship granted on the strength of their program contributions gives them a documented recognition of the qualities — discipline, persistence, team-first reliability — that the sport’s spotlight usually reserves for players whose statistics earned it on the field.
The second class and what it signals
That the program reached a second class matters. One-time awards are gestures; sustained ones become institutions. By naming Parker Sansing at Alabama and Julius Kidd and Bradley Thomas at South Alabama to the second class, 68 Ventures signaled that the award intends to keep honoring the state’s walk-ons year after year, with each new class adding to a roster of players whose contributions would otherwise go unrecorded anywhere but their teams’ internal records.
The award’s timing — honoring senior walk-ons as their college careers end — also captures the window in which their stories can still be told in a college context. After graduation, walk-ons disperse into careers, graduate programs, coaching, and the rest of life, and the identity of “former walk-on” follows them as a private credential rather than a public one. A scholarship with their name attached gives that identity a permanent, documented form.
For college football in Alabama, where the walk-on tradition is as old as the sport itself, that documentation is long overdue — and the second class of the 68 Ventures Walk-On Scholarship is now part of it, at Alabama and at South Alabama alike.
South Alabama’s own walk-on pipeline
The University of South Alabama’s program has a particular relationship with the walk-on experience because of its youth. The Jaguars played their first season in 2009, meaning every South Alabama roster has been built within the modern era of college football — and within a recruiting footprint where south Alabama high schools produce more college-capable players than scholarship offers can accommodate. Walk-ons from Mobile, Baldwin County, and the surrounding counties are a persistent presence on the Jaguars’ depth chart and practice fields.
Players like Julius Kidd and Bradley Thomas, honored as seniors, represent the full arc of that path: arriving without a scholarship, surviving the season in which walk-ons are most likely to quit, and lasting to a final year in which their experience makes them stabilizing presences in the locker room. Programs value those players in ways that show up in how teammates talk about them — as the standard for how practice is conducted and how a roster holds together across a long season.
Alabama’s own walk-on history, meanwhile, supplies the program’s founding logic. Nathan Cox’s move from walk-on to founder of a scholarship honoring others like him completes a loop that college football has relied on for more than a century: former players converting what the game gave them into something for the players who come after. The award’s criteria — humility, toughness, relentless work ethic — are the qualities the walk-on experience itself selects for and demands.
Together, the second class ties Tuscaloosa and Mobile into a single statement about Alabama football culture: that the sport’s foundation is built by players no one recruited, honored here by name — Parker Sansing at Alabama, Julius Kidd and Bradley Thomas at South Alabama — with a scholarship that says what their programs’ rosters have always known. The game runs on them, and now, once a year, it says so.
