Scouring the basketball court for the next great tight end

When Andre Kelly gently broke the news that he didn’t intend to play football as a sophomore, his high school coach worried that he might be making a mistake.

Brian Gray tried to make sure Kelly understood how much he would be walking away from if he focused exclusively on basketball.

Kelly was the rare athlete with immense potential in two sports. During football season, he was a tight end with the size and strength to open a hole for a running back yet possessed the sure hands and agility to shed a linebacker and pluck passes out of the air. Then over the winter he morphed into a broad-shouldered power forward nimble enough to lead a fast break and make plays in the open floor.

By the end of Kelly’s freshman year at Lincoln High School in Stockton, Calif., college football and basketball coaches were already showing interest. Gray envisioned Kelly attracting an array of high-major Division I scholarship offers if he stuck with football, which is why it was difficult for him to accept Kelly’s decision not to keep playing.

“My whole deal was to make sure that Andre was making an informed decision,” Gray told Yahoo Sports. “ He didn’t have to stop playing football to play basketball. He could have done both and excelled at both. When a kid who was that talented was entertaining the decision to walk away, I just wanted to make sure that he was completely sure and his parents were completely sure.”

Eight years ago, Kelly didn’t waver a bit in his decision to walk away from football and see how far basketball could take him. Now, the former Cal and UC Santa Barbara hooper looks back at that choice with a tinge of regret.

Since his final college basketball season ended last month with UC Santa Barbara’s first-round NCAA tournament loss to Baylor, Kelly has been running routes, catching passes, pushing blocking sleds and bulking up in the weight room. The 6-foot-9, 260-pound aspiring tight end is hoping to showcase enough raw talent to persuade an NFL team to take a flier on him as an undrafted free agent and to develop him on its practice squad.

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“My mentality is why not give it a shot?” Kelly told Yahoo Sports. “It’s definitely a crazy ride going from shooting a basketball every day to getting back on the football field, but I love both sports and I feel like I have nothing to lose.”

NFL front offices have long been willing to place low-risk, high-upside bets on college basketball players who have scarcely played football but have physical traits that fit a certain position. The most common transition is the power forward-to-tight end evolution that Kelly is attempting.

The success of the likes of Marcus Pollard, Antonio Gates and Jimmy Graham has sent NFL scouts to college basketball games in search of malleable athletes who possess the size, physicality and explosiveness of a prototypical tight end.

“From a business standpoint, I look at it as a really low-risk proposition for NFL teams,” said

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