During summer training camp at Francis Field, just before the school year at Washington University starts, head football coach Larry Kindbom likes to call out a pair of names,

“Lake and Lake!”

The declaration is met by a chorus of chatter from the amped-up athletes around him.

“We just wanted to see what was going to happen,” Kindbom recalled with a grin.

No. 64 sophomore defensive lineman Jared Lake plays in the Bears’ game against the University of Chicago. Lake had 24 tackles, 2 pass breakups and a fumble recovery this year.

On a stretch of turf about a yard wide, senior right guard Ben Lake squats low, a healthy beard poking out from under the his helmet. In the breathless moment before the whistle, he stares down the sophomore defensive end that he spent the better part of 22 years knocking around both on the football field and on their farm back in central Kentucky. The player glaring back at him is his brother, Jared.

When the whistle sounds, the two boys charge at each other like rams on a mountainside. This is the Oklahoma drill, a popular practice technique primarily used early in the season where an offensive and defensive player battle mano-a-mano for control narrow strip of turf. It is a violent collision of muscle and nerve that represents football in its purest form. For the coaches, it is a way to evaluate players at game speed. For the two participants battling one on one, it is a medium where pride and bragging rights are on the line. Add sibling rivalry to the mix, and you would think you have a recipe for a titanic clash.

“What I loved was that it probably didn’t matter,” Kindbom said of the intentional family matchup. “That just the way those guys are—‘Who ever is there, I’m going to block them out.’ It wasn’t just a bragging rights thing.”

There is a level of hard-nosed humility that permeates Ben and Jared’s relationship. If you ask either brother who usually gets the upper hand in these types of paired drills, both assert that the score is about even.

“They know the moment they say, ‘I’m the guy that won the war,’ the other guy is going to beat them the next time,” Kindbom said.

The boys are quick to shower praise on each other. Ben claims that Jared is much stronger in the weight room. Back in high school, Ben remembers his brother squatting 500 pounds while he was only pushing 415. Jared would counter that Ben was shattering the school record before he could even get past 250.

That is not to say Ben and Jared are all about diplomatic platitudes. According to Kindbom, on the field they are just as quick to jab and rag on each other to improve, lest one of them gets the upper hand.

There are few positional rivalries in sports as natural as the one between an offensive and defensive linemen and it takes a certain type of personality to excel at each position. An offensive lineman must be resolute, able to distil the random ferocity of football into protected backfields and running lanes; a sentinel that is equal parts unstoppable force and immovable object. A defensive lineman is the perfect foil. He does everything he can to force chaos out of order. In many ways, Ben and Jared fit these mold.

Ben is the quintessential older brother. He has a story for just about every occasion and he remembers each with a perceptive conviction. Occasionally, he will pepper his conversation with quotable one-liners accompanied by an easy smile. On the field, he is the lone senior member of the offensive line and a team captain, a resource for Kindbom in communicating with the players.

“I’ve always found the ability to talk to him when I wanted to get a handle of where the squad is on something,” Kindbom said.

Senior offensive lineman Ben Lake plays in the Bears’ game against Rhodes College. The Bears won this home game 37-7.

“It’s not like monumental moments necessarily. It’s almost more day-to-day common stuff,” Kindbom said. “He commands that respect. He certainly doesn’t demand that respect and doesn’t ask them for it. He commands it because of what he does”

In his third full season on the offensive line, Ben led a Bears unit that gave up nine total sacks, the lowest number since at least 2001.

Jared is a little more of a free spirit, probably best illustrated by his academic career path. Unlike Ben, who decided fairly early on that he wanted to come to Wash. U., Jared juggled the commitment for a long time before applying early decision.

“Jared is more along the lines of, ‘I know I have a lot of opportunities to do a lot of things here. What gets me most excited?’” Ben said.

This year was Jared’s first full season on the defensive line. In 10 games he tallied 24 tackles, two pass breakups and a fumble recovery.

******

About a 10-minute drive outside of Berea, Ky., the local economic powerhouse is the town of Cartersville. Calling it “sleepy” is an overstatement. As far as Google Earth can discern, it is about three roads and a collection of small farms.

“It’s pretty much a grocery store and a sign that says welcome to Cartersville,” Ben said with a chuckle.

One of those farms is a 42-acre plot of land that the Lake family bought in 1903. Like many of the small farms around Cartersville and the rest of Kentucky, the Lakes earned a living selling tobacco. However, the economic landscape changed when the Food and Drug Administration stopped subsidizing prices in 2004. The Lakes and 70 percent of the tobacco growers in Kentucky were given a buyout. Nowadays, it is rare to see anyone, especially in the Cartersville area, growing tobacco.

“It’s like finding a four-leaf clover in a clover patch,” Ben said.

Back when the farm still grew the crop, Ben and Jared would help out by following the setter. For you city slickers out there, a setter is a tractor that furrows the field, plants and covers. Every once and while, the setter would miss a spot, or the plants would be placed crooked. The brothers would trail and fix any mistake.

“We would be five and six years old out there,” Ben said. “It’d be in the 90s, [we’d be] barefoot running down these big fields and we’d be carrying these little tobacco plants and planting them behind the setter when they’d miss them.”

After the buyout, most farms now raise dairy, corn, soybeans or, if they are like the Lakes, beef cattle. The boys still help out when they can, but between school, football and jobs, Ben and Jared are rarely free. Their uncle, along with his two daughters, do most of the work with the help of the Ben and Jared’s dad, Scott Lake.

One benefit to Cartersville is that family is abundant. Very abundant. On the main stretch of road in the town there is about 20 houses. At one point, Ben counted that he and his brother were related to 14 of them. That is including fourth and fifth cousins, of course.

“As long as you put a number on it, I consider it kin,” Ben said.

The proximity has its drawbacks. When it came to finding a spouse, the brothers’ dad met their mother, Karla, at the University of Eastern Kentucky. Mom is originally from Louisville.

“Dad always jokes that he had to go all the way to Louisville to find someone he wasn’t kin to,” Ben said.

Similarly, Ben is now dating a girl from Southern Missouri. One day, he asked his grandpa if he knew anyone from the area.

“He said, ‘Yeah I think we got cousins that live over there.’”

Needless to say, Ben did not broach the subject any further.

Courtesy of Ben Lake

The small creek located on the Lake family farm. When they were younger, the brothers would catch crawfish and play in the water.

With nothing but family in all directions and their farmhouse set back about a quarter mile from the main road, the brothers had to rely on each other for entertainment. They recite memories of playing in the creek on their property, catching crayfish as big as lobsters and hunting like they were yesterday. Because of football and AP classes, most of their memories are from the winter.

When it snowed, Ben and Jared would play hide-and-seek in the fields with their cousins, tracking their footprints across all 42 acres.

“Sometimes you’d realize you were just walking in a circle,” Jared reminisced.

Staying true to his nature, Jared took every opportunity to have fun at his brother’s expense.

“More often than not, I’d usually find him at home,” Ben said. “When he got tired of running around, he’d go home and get hot chocolate.”

Ben asserts that he was not always the prank victim.

“I come up with some pretty good ones of my own every now and again. I just don’t leave him running around the field in the cold,” Ben said while Jared chuckled in the background.

With no school in Cartersville, the boys went to Rockcastle County High in the next county over. It was a small public school in Mt. Vernon, Ky., with about 900 kids total and a vocational school right next door. Poverty was and still is a huge barrier in that area of Kentucky, and this year over 75 percent of the student body qualified for free and reduced lunch. As you would imagine, the dropout rate was high.

“A lot of those kids, they don’t want to be in school,” Ben said. “They want to learn stuff that’s very practical.”

Most students who stayed zeroed in on vocational classes, like welding, electrical wiring and computers.

Almost every student at Rockcastle that goes to college stays in state at places like Eastern Kentucky University and the University of Kentucky. Ben, who was the valedictorian of his class, was the only person to leave Kentucky. Jared, the salutatorian, was one of two. The other was a girl that went to a mission church school in Tennessee.

******

At Wash. U., academics and extracurriculars dominate the landscape. At Rockcastle, football was king. The town would shut down on game day and 2,000 to 3,000 people would show up to watch the Rockets play. To put that into perspective, as of 2010, only 2,477 people actually lived in Mt. Vernon. It was a town spectacle with fireworks and music from the marching band. In Ben’s first two years on the team, a cannon beyond the end zone would fire every time the home team scored. The whole scene conjures up images of cars with tailfins and the school quarterback crowned homecoming king.

This is an unrealistic romanticization, of course, but the truth stands that football was ingrained into the culture of Rockcastle High.

“Everyone had a connection to football somehow whether it be their grandparents played football there or something,” Jared said. “Not many people left the state. Not many people left the country…so it was sort of like you were going to watch your family play football.”

Ben recalls one instance when he became friends with a junior quarterback on the Rockets when he was a freshman. Turns out that the quarterback was his cousin.

The old cultural trope of the high school football player turned town celebrity was very real at Rockcastle. During Ben’s senior year, the Rockets were 7-0 and the whole county was elated. The night before the next game, he and Jared wore their game jerseys out to a pizza parlor in Berea. They were sitting down when two elementary school-aged kids and their dads walked in.

“These two kids kinda looked at us, looked at each other, then looked back at us, tapped their daddies on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, they play football. That’s Ben Lake, that’s Jared Lake! I know who they are,’” Ben said. The two kids came over and talked to them like they were superstars.

Ben even signed a few autographs back in high school.

“I wasn’t so lucky. I must have been too scary,” Jared quipped.

That kind of hero worship quickly disappeared when the boys arrived at Wash. U. Instead of causing young kids to tug at their dads’ sleeves, in St. Louis, they are faces in the crowd. Students who happen to play football.

“Here people who get the good test grades are like the gods,” Jared said. “Sports, not so much.”

It is no secret that school spirit is not a main draw for students and athletes are less likely to be recognized than the kid who got an 83 on an organic chemistry exam. Every star athlete makes that sacrifice when they chose Wash. U. over a Division I program.

Things are getting better, though. For proof, look at the groups of students that took a fan bus all the way to Kansas City to watch the women’s soccer team compete in the NCAA tournament finals. Even the pep band adds a level of atmosphere that was missing from Francis Field.

“It feels like a sporting event out there; it’s great,” Ben said.

All these improvements are a result of heavy marketing from the Athletic Department and independent gumption from the student body.

It may not be Rockcastle High, but it is another chapter in the Lake brother’s life of football.