<div id="subtitle">West Virginia's Payton Brooks making transition from swimming pool to football field at WR</div><div><p>When coach Bill Stewart took the West Virginia football team to the university's pool after a grueling day of practice recently, defensive back Guesly Dervil challenged Payton Brooks to a race.</p><p>Bad move.</p><p>Brooks shot off the starting block and quickly got ahead of Dervil, who gave up.</p><p>Lesson learned. Don't mess with the swimmer.</p><p>"No one challenged him after that," said wide receivers coach Lonnie Galloway.</p><p>Brooks, a five-time all-Big East performer in sprint freestyle events, ended his WVU swim career last winter and is using a fifth year of eligibility to walk on as a wide receiver. He's currently practicing with the reserves.</p><p>Brooks understandably turned heads upon his arrival at summer workouts, a risky decision considering he never played varsity football in high school.</p><p>"First it was kind of like, 'who's the new guy?'" Brooks said. "It's a strange correlation. The two sports don't match up too well. So it was kind of like, 'a swimmer? Why is he here?'"</p><p>Stewart, always a champion of the underdog, liked Brooks' courage to try out.</p><p>"That's what makes the world go around. Why not?" Stewart said. "We all may not be astronauts but by golly we can all work at NASA."</p><p>Brooks played ninth-grade football at Hurricane High School. As a 5-foot-5, 135-pound sophomore, he broke his wrist a week before the season started and never saw varsity action.</p><p>Some friends who competed with Brooks on a club swim team as a youngster then persuaded him to return to the pool year-round.</p><p>He placed third in the 100-yard backstroke in the high school state meet as a sophomore, won the 50 freestyle and took second in the 100 backstroke as a junior, and won the 100 and 200 freestyles as a senior, setting a state record in the 200.</p><p>When his college swim career was over, Brooks found out he could compete in a fifth season, as long as it wasn't swimming.</p><p>Football was an easy choice. Brooks had been attending WVU games since he was an infant. Now at 6-1 and 190 pounds, he was a respectable size for a wide receiver.</p><p>"I gave myself a week to really sit down and ask myself if I wanted to go through all the training and the hard work," Brooks said. "I thought it was well worth it just to be a part of the program."</p><p>As good a shape as he was in from all those laps in the pool, Brooks wasn't ready for all the running. And the speed of the game compared to high school "is a totally different atmosphere," he said.</p><p>Alric Arnett is the incumbent at the X-receiver spot and freshman Logan Heastie and redshirt freshman Ryan Nehlen have been penciled in behind him.</p><p>Galloway made no promises about Brooks seeing action in a game.</p><p>"The biggest thing for him is just not playing football for the last four-five years," Galloway said. "He's not the fastest, but he gets in the right spot. Will he play? I don't know. But if there's a spot somewhere in a game where I could put him in, I plan to."</p><p>Brooks could be the latest in a line of successful football walk-ons at WVU that include fullback Owen Schmitt, now with the Seattle Seahawks. He also would join current starting quarterback Jarrett Brown as a two-sport athlete. Brown played for the WVU basketball team in the 2007-08 season.</p><p>"My goal is just to stay healthy and be a part of it and take it all in," Brooks said. "If I can run out of the tunnel just one time, it would make me happy and make it all worth it."</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=57345126&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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