{"id":264268,"date":"2025-08-05T17:51:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T17:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/264268\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T17:51:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T17:51:14","slug":"meet-the-ravens-rookie-who-hopes-to-answer-teams-punt-return-prayers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/264268\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Ravens rookie who hopes to answer team\u2019s punt return prayers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>LaJohntay Wester is used to being the smallest and thus usually doubted.<\/p>\n<p>Long before the rookie was a sixth-round draft pick of the Ravens selected to be their answer to last season\u2019s punt return woes, he spent his childhood in southwest Florida sandwiched between his bigger, taller football playing brothers John Jr. and Jaylen, both of whom played defense and often had their way with the diminutive middle child of John and Laquita Wester.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI didn\u2019t really like contact growing up,\u201d LaJohntay told The Baltimore Sun. \u201cI wanted to score and dance, so I stayed on the offensive side.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t always easy to do so in the Wester household, where the boys\u2019 father wouldn\u2019t return home from his day jobs as a personal trainer and massage therapist until around 11 p.m., walk in the door and immediately challenge his sons to race him out in the street.<\/p>\n<p>Read the<a href=\"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/2025\/08\/05\/meet-ravens-rookie-punt-returner-lajohntay-wester\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/2025\/08\/05\/meet-ravens-rookie-punt-returner-lajohntay-wester\/\" class=\"themeColorForLinks\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"> full story<\/a> on the Baltimore Sun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LaJohntay Wester is used to being the smallest and thus usually doubted. Long before the rookie was a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2052],"tags":[184,117,51845,2282,7,3614,6,11355,169,2583,51844,17068],"class_list":{"0":"post-264268","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-baltimore-ravens","8":"tag-baltimore","9":"tag-baltimore-ravens","10":"tag-baltimore-sun","11":"tag-baltimoreravens","12":"tag-football","13":"tag-lajohntay-wester","14":"tag-nfl","15":"tag-punt-return","16":"tag-ravens","17":"tag-rookie","18":"tag-sixth-round-draft-pick","19":"tag-southwest-florida"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114977432229047330","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}