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Three years ago, on a warm Friday night in mid-July, Jonathan Jakubowski stood on the sidelines of the 12th annual Regional All-Star Football Game in Perrysburg, Ohio. It was a game that featured the top seniors from around the region and Jakubowski, a graduate of Rossford High School, was selected, coming off a stellar senior season.

However, unlike some of the other players at Steinbickler Stadium that night – which included a stand-out punter from Toledo St. John’s named Brandon Fields (Michigan State) – Jakubowski stood there wondering when and where his next game would be.

Having only been offered Division II and III scholarships, the then 5-foot-11-inch, 170 pound linebacker was thinking he should look outside of Division I. Only Bowling Green, Kent State and Toledo had been looking at him as a preferred walk on.

Something powerful was going to have to persuade the All-District and All-Northern Lakes League linebacker, who had made 118 tackles his final season, to come to one of those three schools.

That force would be his faith.

“I’m a real strong Christian and at that point of time I was thinking, ‘well, I’m not getting any Division I offers, maybe I’ll go D-II or D-III,'” Jakubowski said of his dilemma. “I thought and prayed about it for months and I felt after March when I came here to BG and met a couple of guys, Jerry Wagner and Jason Morton. I met those guys and they really had an impression on me on their faith and I felt God was telling me BG was the place.”

Now, after three seasons of hard work and play for the Falcon football team, he has earned the Division I scholarship that never came to him in high school. Following the final day of training camp on Aug. 20, Head Coach Gregg Brandon announced he and teammate, Andrew Stanford, would be awarded scholarships for their hard work.

“It was a great feeling, I had a big smile on my face,” he said of earning the scholarship. “I knew that I had earned their trust and earned their respect enough to give me a scholarship and that satisfied me the most.”

Jakubowski, who is now 6-foot-1-inch tall and weighs 221 pounds, has been a big part of the BG special teams unit and scout team the past three seasons. Last season he played in seven games recording seven tackles and in 2003 he played in three games recording one tackle in the Central Michigan game. Afterward he was named defensive scout team MVP. He started out as a strong safety before being moved to linebacker where he is now a backup to Teddy Piepkow.

Coach Brandon has seen what a “great leader” he can be and says he is the type of guy that you want to have around.

“He’s a great student, with almost a 4.0 GPA, and a really good team guy,” he said of Jakubowski. “He’s really improved himself, as far as his strength and speed, and he’s matured throughout his college career.”

Jakubowski’s efforts have also been noticed over the years by BG Assistant Coach John Bowers as he has worked his way up. Bowers was his position coach while he was a strong safety and a big part of his development.

“There is no one on our defense who has paid a heavier price than that guy has paid,” Bowers said. “He has worked his way up every year, and has gotten better and better and better.”

Though he knew he was making improvements and working hard to improve each season, Jakubowski went through times where his faith was tested. Not only did he have to make it through Coach Urban Meyer’s two-a-days “that kicked your butt and made you just want to quit the team,” but he had to continue making the commitment each season being a preferred walk-on that made it on following a special teams try-out his freshman season.

“I don’t know how many times, especially the first couple of years, I just felt like giving it up,” he said. “It’s not the sense that you’re not getting paid, but it’s the heart-ness of it. The coaches obviously will invest more time in a guy they’re investing $80,000 dollars in than someone they haven’t invested any money in, so you know they’ll be a string ahead of you in spring ball just because of that, and that’s understandable, but you just have to endure through that and the only reason I made it through that was my faith.”

That faith has also carried him to other places than the college football field or to a university, as he spent six months of his junior year of high school doing missions work in Guatemala. There he helped to give out food to locals and helped to re-build some churches following an earthquake that took place in El Salvador.

During that time he learned how to speak Spanish quite fluently and decided that once again “God was calling” him to a destination, which made him take up international business, along with a duel-major in marketing with a Spanish minor.

“I felt God calling me when I was there to the people of Central America and one thing that had attracted me was business,” he said. “With most of those countries, a very effective way to get into the country and administer to the people is through business. Now with CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) that just passed with President Bush, it opens the doors wide open for me to go down there.”

While in Central America, he says he’d like to start a business, relocate a business there or do some sort of a joint venture that will allow him to fulfill what he considers God’s vision for him in that area of the world.

Here at Bowling Green, Jakubowski tries to fulfill his ministry duties by being a leader for IMPACT Ministries, a Christian ministry on campus that teammates Wagner and Morton lead him to. There, he helps in running two discipleship study courses during the week, along with a big Bible study class once a week and a leaders meeting on Sunday nights.

His motto to anyone who is facing adversity and difficulties similar to his, is to keep fighting through it because it’ll pay off in the end.

“If you wait maybe a little longer and stick through it and have a little endurance, what helped me was my faith,” he explained. “But if you can stick through with it, you’ll see that in the end it’ll be worth it… more times than not.”

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