Reggie Bush Ready for School Reunion
He played on same prep team as 49ers' quarterback Smith

Saints tailback Reggie Bush and 49ers quarterback Alex Smith will play in the same game Sunday for the first time since they led Helix High School to back-to-back section championships in La Mesa, Calif., in 2000 and 2001.

How good was that team? Smith, the NFL's No. 1 draft pick in 2005, was the odd man out.

"I'll tell you one thing. Growing up with Alex, he was always the slowest guy on the team. Always," Reggie Bush said. "Then he got to Utah and started running the option and started out-running people. I was like, 'This is not the same guy.' I didn't recognize him.

"He was good in high school, and I thought he had it. He didn't receive maybe the recruiting attention as other guys. I really don't know what that came from. But we had a lot of athletes on that team. We spread the ball around a lot, we ran it a lot. It was me, we had another running back that was just as good as me, we had him, and most of our skill players all ran track. So we were really fast. We used to just kill teams."

While Reggie Bush went on to win a Heisman Trophy and compete for the national championship every year at USC, Smith landed at Utah, where he helped put that program on the map with a BCS bowl bid in 2004.

Smith then defied the odds by becoming the only Helix teammate to go No. 1 in the draft. Reggie Bush, as will forever be remembered in Saints lore, fell to No. 2.

"He kind of screwed it up," Smith said. "We were going to be the first high school teammates ever to go 1-1. And he was the lock. He was the for-sure."

Smith, who is a year older than Reggie Bush, said he remembers his first impression of the 15-year-old sophomore they had all been hearing so much about before summer passing leagues.

"We were all thinking, 'He's supposed to be good.' No one knew how good, how fast," Smith said. "And I remember throwing little 4-yard passes to him and guys couldn't even touch him. All you had to do (in that league) was get a hand on him, and he's down. And guys were diving at his feet and coming up with air."

The two players were friends in high school, where Smith's dad is the principal, and they have kept in touch over time, especially when Reggie Bush was preparing to turn pro. They exchanged text messages earlier this week, but Reggie Bush said they probably won't see each other until Sunday in the Superdome.

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