BuffStampede.com caught up with former Buff Ben Kelly as part of our off-season series of "Catching up with" features. Kelly was an all-Big 12 selection all three seasons he played for the Buffs, from 1997-99.

Ben Kelly: "Good. I have done a lot of the things I set out to do. I have no complaints."

"Part of the time and I spend a lot of my time in Boston now."

"During the season I keep up quite a bit. It has been hard the last few years but I keep up with them. I am always checking out what they got going. The program been through a lot of transition and a lot of changes since I was there. I went out there a couple years ago for the Buffs4Life event so I keep up, I root for them. I am hoping that we turn things around out there. It has been difficult obviously. They haven't been to a bowl game in a while, haven't been competitive in a lot of games, blown out a lot, that's not good. College football is all about recruiting and you have to be able to recruit. You can draw up Xs and Os but you need guys to be able to recruit. You need athletes. Like they say, it is about the Jimmys and Joes, not the Xs and Os."

"I started when I was seven years old."

"Yeah, that was always my thing. I was always one of the smaller guys and in football, if you are small, you better be fast. Speed is something that I was born with and I was able to help most of the people I played with because of it."

"I actually went to three different high school and I finished up at Mentor Lake Catholic. It was a program that was pretty well established. The head coach John Gibbons is in the [Ohio] High School [Football] Coaches [Association] Hall of Fame so getting with him, that is when it first got serious for me. He instilled in me what it took to grow up and mature, and helped me realize that I could reach a lot of goals and dreams."

"My recruiting process was distant for a while. I went to three different high schools, my family moved all over the place, so I was under the radar at first. I don't think we had all these publications back when I was in high school as far as ratings. But I went to a football camp at the University of Michigan the summer between my junior and senior year and at the time, that was probably one of the biggest camps in the country. A lot of college recruiters were there. I went there and I performed well and that was when I first started getting recruited. I initially got in touch with Rick Neuheisel at Colorado soon after that camp and I also got in touch with Bobby Hauck, who was CU's recruiting coordinator and special teams coach back at that time. Those two I was pretty much talking to every week after that point."

"I visited a few schools. I went to Syracuse and I went to a lot of the MAC schools like Eastern Michigan, Akron and Central Michigan. But when CU offered me a scholarship and brought me out on a visit, I was there with my father, and we talked about me committing for probably five minutes. I didn't want to wait from the airport to campus to commit. That was something where I just knew, this is where I want to be. The differences between Cleveland, Ohio, and Boulder and Denver, Colorado, it is like night and day. You get a Cleveland kid to fly or drive out there, the scenery I'm looking at, it just kind of blows you away."

"That was awesome. The returns, kickoff and punt returns, that was something I really enjoyed. I really got a high off of that. You are the only one back there, you know the ball is coming to you, everybody is anticipating your next move, I loved that part of the game. I actually liked being a returner, that was my favorite thing to do out of everything I did playing ball."

"Yeah, I was fine with that. As a cornerback, I did that and I worked hard at it. I put in the time in the off-season to do well there, but as a returner, that is just something that was just natural. I was naturally a better ball carrier than I was a defender. I had to work a lot harder as a defensive back. I was proud of what I was able to accomplish as a defensive back but the love I had for the game was as a ball carrier. I wish I could have gotten more opportunities carrying the ball on the offensive side. So when I got an opportunity to return, that was my love, my joy, what I wanted to do, what I wanted to excel at. And I thought I could do that better than anybody else."

"[Utah State] didn't bring their special teams out. They would get in the shotgun formation and their quarterback would just sort of punt it. What we saw on film the previous weeks was they were just trying to catch you off guard so you weren't able to set up a return. They were doing that on film to their previous opponents so we kind of left our defense out there just in case and I would just run back there to catch a pooch kick if that is what they were going to do. The opportunity was awesome just because they had their offense on the field. Offensive players are not the best tacklers, they are not used to covering kicks, so we figured if we can at least get the ball, we can probably make a great play. So that was scouting, coaching, something that we had in our back pocket, and they did it.

"The Wyoming game, we got down late in the game. We had a couple different return schemes and we had a different return than our standard set up there. We just happened to get a great kick. It was right where we had practiced. And that is very rare in special teams where you get a kick that allows everybody to set up their blocks right on time. Things just worked out well. Everybody knew we needed a big play and everybody executed."

"In the locker room, it wasn't something we debated. They called it no good so it was no good. To this day, I haven't seen a replay of that kick so I have no idea if it really went through or not."

"The things you miss when you are not there, and I know you hear a lot of athletes say it, but it is not any particular game or play, it is just the camaraderie you have with your teammates. You never have that in life again. When I played in the NFL, you don't have that same camaraderie. You are in a bubble in college. Everybody is between 18 and 22, the whole campus basically, not just your teammates. You are in your own little world so everybody is kind of in a similar situation. Everybody is trying to grow up. Everybody is away from home for the first time without their parents. You are just growing with a whole bunch of people from different backgrounds, states, cities. You just form a bond. A lot of the guys I played with in college and a lot of other students are still great friends of mine today. I call them up, they call me, we meet up. We reminisce about times. We don't necessarily talk about specific games or plays, though. We talk about the camaraderie that we built up."

"I left early but I was there four years. I redshirted my first year. I did have another year of eligibility left but the program was going through a lot of transition at the time and I just felt it was my time to go. I accomplished most of the things I wanted to in college. In wanted to challenge myself even more. I don't really regret that. If I had to do it again, I wouldn't do anything different."

"It was an awesome experience. Being part of that organization, that was the first Super Bowl that we won. Back at that time, the New England Patriots weren't the New England Patriots we know now. It was great to see how that foundation was laid, to see how Coach Bill Belichick and his staff ran the organization, to see how it was built to be one of the best organizations in all of sports. You got to experience so many great players, so many great coaches. That coaching staff, we had guys like Charlie Weis, Eric Mangini, Romeo Crennel, Rob Ryan, Josh McDaniels, that were eventual head coaches. Being around all that knowledge at once, you'd learn things you had never even though of."

"I started experiencing injuries early on. I had a knee injury my rookie year and then everything snowballed. Every time I'd come back, I'd have another injury. Dealing with injuries was frustrating because I had never missed a practice before that during high school or college. I started spending more time with the training staff than the coaching staff. I realized this is not a lifelong type of career. Physically you just aren't able to do it for very long. I was involved in a lot of other things. When you are injured in the NFL, you are not really part of the team. You go in early in the morning and get your treatment and physical therapy and then you're done at 8 in the morning every day. So if you don't find something to do, I don't know what you would do. I tried getting involved with different endeavors, I got involved a lot with network marketing, which I enjoyed."

"Yeah, I do quite a few camps. I linked up with a group called Gridiron Gang. It is just a bunch of football camps for kids from seven years old all the way through high school. We've put on camps for youngsters that otherwise wouldn't have an opportunity to go to one. All of the country, we do Michigan, Ohio, we were down in Florida a couple weeks ago. I do that with a few of my former teammates. I love doing that. I also actually got involved with coaching in a women's football league last year, the Legends Football League, which used to be called the Lingerie Football League. I coached the Toledo Crush last season so I am around the game a little bit. It is a little bit different but it is still football at the end of the day. I have an 11-year old son now and he is very involved with football in youth leagues so I am getting back into it. I love working with the kids, but as far as doing football for a career or job, that is not something I am interested in."

"Honestly the harder part of being a returning is securing a catch. Once you are confident catching the ball, not letting it bounce, it makes it so much easier. Now, if you get scared by somebody tackling you at full speed, you probably shouldn't be a return man. The biggest tip I would give any young return man or potential return guy is you have to catch balls ad nauseam. You have to do it religiously all summer. I used to drag Nick Pietsch, the punter at CU back in the day, out all the time. It would just be me and him on an open field. Punt after punt after punt after punt. I would drag the kicker out, too, jugs machine, everything. I would catch thousands of balls. You have to be able to be comfortable catching the ball and securing the ball and not turning the ball over. And if you do that, then you have your freestyle moment. That is your time to do what you do."

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