In football Switzerland, Alex Raich does not have to be introduced: The Churer completed the youth department with the Calanda Broncos, won Swiss U16 and U19 titles as a quarterback and subsequently collected several NLA titles with the Broncos as a young adult, where he learned to fear his opponents as a hard-hitting safety.
For Raich, however, these successes were only the beginning: Three years ago, Raich took the plunge to the USA, where he quickly gained a foothold in the “West College” in Huntington Beach in California. The corona crisis slowed down the rise of the young Grisons somewhat, but after a cancelled season, Raich immediately resumed his strong performances last autumn. With 26 tackles and 4.5 tackles for loss of space, the 1.90 m tall and 92 kg athlete also attracted attention at larger universities.
The effort has found a (temporary) happy ending: The University of Kansas offered the Churer a football scholarship. Raich is thus moving to the highest college football league in the USA, where he is expected to stay for two years. The Jayhawks are not one of the big teams in the FBS, but with an average attendance of 33,874 fans per home game (2021), the leap for Raich is nevertheless enormous.
“I’m very excited and happy to start a new chapter in my life,” Raich told a Jayhawks fan page, “making it into the highest college football division was one of the reasons I started the football journey in the UNITED States. I can’t wait to play and work at such a professional level.”
Raich, who was recruited as a linebacker safety and wears the number 34, can definitely look forward to legendary league opponents such as the Texas Longhorns or the Oklahoma Sooners in huge football temples. However, the competition to work its way into the regular roster remains fierce: Kansas currently has no less than 14 linebackers on the roster. Raich’s versatility and game intelligence could benefit the former quarterback.
The leap to the USA was difficult and big, says Raich: “Football is not very popular in Switzerland and for this reason quite small. The level is not comparable to the USA. However, I started in Chur at the age of 12 and immediately fell in love with the sport. As I kept playing and got better, my competitive ‘mindset’ led me to these new challenges.”
A newspaper in Kansas described Raich’s career as follows: “He has been playing football since he was 12, is from Chur, a town in the Eastern Alps near the border with Austria and Liechtenstein, and before moving to the United States studied at Quader Schulhaus.”
Even if Raich did not learn to play football in the quad schoolhouse (in the USA, the sports are mainly taught in schools in his youth), the “export” is also a huge success for the Calanda Broncos: Even before Raich, Dea Baumann – Raich’s predecessor as quarterback at the Broncos Juniors – a Churer had made the leap to the USA. However, no Graubünden player has ever made it to the highest AMERICAN college football league before Raich.