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Jul 24, 2025; Charlotte, NC, USA; Boston College wide receiver Lewis Bond answers questions from the media during ACC Media Days at Hilton Charlotte Uptown. Mandatory Credit: Jim Dedmon-Imagn Images Jim Dedmon-Imagn Images

'Not Good Enough': How Leisure Walks Helps BC Wide Receiver Lewis Bond Visualize Greatness

Originally posted on Boston College Eagles on SI
By Graham Dietz | Last updated Jul 26, 2025 6:32 PM ET

Going on long walks helps Lewis Bond clear his mind.

Bond started taking walks more regularly this summer as a way to reset, focus on his goals, and stay present with himself. He said it’s become a habit which has allowed him to keep a one-step-at-a-time attitude, literally and figuratively.

He has aspirations for himself, no doubt about it. But he’s trying something different heading into his senior year at Boston College.

As a redshirt junior in 2024, Bond’s 67 catches ranked as the sixth most in single-season history for the Boston College Eagles’ football program. Bond has totaled 1,335 receiving yards across the past two seasons and he earned All-ACC Honorable Mention honors in both.

His next step is guided through this new form of meditation—one walk, one step at a time.

And knowing that each step comes with a different set of circumstances, always.

“It’s a mindset,” Bond told BC Eagles On SI at 2025 ACC Football Kickoff. “If this one play goes bad, I could fix it the next play. Like not harping on one play. I feel like last year and the year before that, one play would ruin my whole day or one play would ruin my whole practice or let that one play become bigger than one play.”

Bond came to Chestnut Hill in 2021 as an under-recruited three-star offensive athlete—a wide receiver and running back—per 247 Sports, ESPN and Rivals, and the No. 20 player at his position in the state of Illinois. He surpassed 1,000 all-purpose yards in 2019 at Kenwood Academy, averaging over 10 yards per carry and 13 yards per reception.

To Bond, becoming an All-ACC Honorable Mention sounds belittling.

It makes sense, given that Bond played his first two seasons watching former BC wide receiver Zay Flowers, the Baltimore Ravens’ wide receiver No. 1, who earned a Third-Team and two First-Team selections in his BC career.

“[Honorable Mention is] not good enough,” Bond said.

Just like himself, Bond thinks the Eagles have been overlooked his entire career on the Heights.

“It’s just something that’s always been there,” Bond said. “It’s just the chip on my shoulder, it’s the facts that it is, and I just gotta go gain that national attention, basically.”

Bond speaks both for himself as an individual and for the program he has now spent four straight years at. The Eagles got a glimpse of national attention last year, swerving into the AP Top-25 Poll at No. 24 after defeating Michigan State at Alumni Stadium in Week Three—which moved BC to 3-1 on the season.

But the rest of 2024 contained bad-timed losses which sent the program back to its mediocre status.

Bond thinks there is a narrative for BC which contains some truth—that the Eagles are incapable of surpassing the seven-win mark in a season, which they have not done since 2009. It only makes him and his teammates more hungry for the opportunity to change that.

Change requires action, however, and Bond said that he left plenty on the table over the two-year span in which he finished as BC’s top receiver in yards.

“It’s on me,” Bond said. “I could’ve done more myself to put us in a better situation the past two years. This year I feel like I took the steps in the spring and now in the summer to do what I’m supposed to do this year.”

The Eagles returned all three players of their starting wide receiver trio from 2024, consisting of Bond, Reed Harris and Jaedn Skeete. They also picked up speedster VJ Wilkins, who spent the last three seasons at Campbell—where he compiled 2,194 all-purpose yards and 11 touchdowns in two seasons—who the group nicknamed “Rocket.”

Bond is unfazed by all of the criticism he has dealt with since he was a high school recruit who didn’t pick up Division I offers until late in his junior season. He is even less rattled by the critics who think BC will “just be BC” again in 2025.

“Why not us?” Bond said. “Why can’t it be us?”

This article first appeared on Boston College Eagles on SI and was syndicated with permission.

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