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Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Tech picks up commitment from Sims
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Quentin Sims, a 6-foot-4, 190-pound receiver, has committed to Georgia Tech after his weekend visit to Atlanta.
He had previously planned to accept a scholarship offer from Buffalo.
Sims is looking forward to finding a role in the Jackets’ new run-oriented offense.
“[Tech coach Paul Johnson] said he felt it would be best if I start out at wide receiver, which is OK with me, but that I could possibly move to slotback or quarterback if I fit in better there,” Sims told Scout.com.
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Jackets may add late recruit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Georgia Tech might pick up a last-minute addition on signing day, a defensive end who in only one year of high school football showed the potential to grow into a major college player.
Antonio Wilson of Columbia High School was reconsidering his commitment to Vanderbilt and might sign with Tech, Columbia coach Kevin Latham said Tuesday evening.
“If I knew, I would tell you, but I don’t,” Latham said. “He looked really stressed out today at school.”
Wilson, 6 feet 5, 215 pounds, played only basketball until his senior season. Last summer, he worked out with the football team as a way to prepare himself for basketball. The football coaches saw his potential and asked him to play.
“He did everything we asked him to do 100 miles an hour,” said Latham, who credited defensive line coach Willie Jordan with getting Wilson ready to play.
Wilson missed some games after getting hurt in a car accident but returned and “played great the last four or five ballgames,” Latham said.
Navy offered him a scholarship, and some Division I-AA schools recruited him. Vanderbilt has been recruiting him for a couple of months, Latham said. Tech, with a new coaching staff, started recruiting him last week.
“People see his upside,” Latham said. “He’s got the frame to be a really big kid. We’re all excited to see what he can be when he bulks up.”
The question: Will he bulk up wearing the gold of Vanderbilt or of Georgia Tech? The answer comes Wednesday morning when Latham brings his players to the ESPN Zone.
“When I see what hat he’s got on, I’ll know,” Latham said.
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DeAngelo Tyson’s beacon of hope
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Statesboro — Coaches across the country wanted defensive tackle DeAngelo Tyson, and today he’ll sign with the University of Georgia. But behind this shining moment is a darker, personal search for recognition — from his blood kin.
He tried to recruit back into his life family members who abandoned or abused him. When they let him down, he did the same to his football team.
At 18, Tyson is today getting what so many people value in football — a college scholarship. So far, he hasn’t secured what he thought he wanted most — a blood-related family.
A bigger family, though, has claimed him and kept his football future alive.
Everything about Tyson is large, including Bambi eyes that absorb all and reveal little. He recalls his life in a whispery monotone mismatched to his 6-foot-2, 304-pound body.
He was 8 when he showed his bruised arm to a school counselor, who got him into foster care. Tyson blamed himself for the separation.
“I felt I had told on my mama,” he said.
Soon he returned to her care, but, “I got my arm broken,” he said.
Tyson recalled his dad calling him once on the phone, seeing him once, then nothing.
Tyson moved in with an aunt in Savannah for nine months, but she “thought it was better for me to go home.”
Home, from the time he was 11, was Joseph’s Home for Boys in Statesboro, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta.
Tyson lived with as many as 14 other boys with stories of family rejection.
“We got boys whose homes were too crowded, like five or six kids in a one-room house, and DFACS would give them 30 to 90 days to relocate,” administrative assistant Suzy Wagner said. “The majority of parents wouldn’t do it.”
The wild boys demanded attention. The quiet Tyson, in his own way, stood out.
“The first time I saw ‘D,’ ” Wagner said, “his hands were so humongous, I thought, ‘How big is this boy going to get?’ “
His parents had left him DNA perfect for football: a naturally fast, strong physique that allowed him to dominate without hard work. By seventh grade, he was a head taller and 40 pounds bigger than most of his peers.
“He was a child who was built like a man,” said Chris Lamb, an insurance executive who coached Tyson in middle school.
Tyson is so guarded that outsiders often see only muscle and mass, not what he is missing inside.
State rules were another obstacle to those who wanted to get close to him. Lamb and his wife, one of Tyson’s teachers in middle school, underwent state screening before the boy could visit them at holidays.
They knew Tyson was afraid of getting injured playing high school football, that he doubted he was good enough. He saw himself more likely as a drummer in the school band.
The Lambs pressed him to use football as his ticket to college, “to be the man he never saw growing up,” Lamb said.
But Tyson balks at making promises, because so few made to him have come true.
Several times, for instance, his mom planned to meet him. She never showed.
“I would think about seeing her, and I’d get happy,” Tyson said. “Then she wouldn’t see me, and I would just give up.”
Before Tyson’s freshman year in 2003, Statesboro High head coach Steve Pennington drove to the Boys Home to persuade him to play.
Tyson was noncommittal, and Pennington left with his fingers crossed.
“That may have been one of our best recruiting jobs, getting him,” said Pennington, who started Tyson as a freshman. The Blue Devils won the 2005 AAAA state championship in Tyson’s sophomore year.
But the headlines he made as a football player led to an identity crisis that almost cost him his future in the sport.
As a junior, he had reached out to his half-sisters on his father’s side and started dating one of their friends. When he broke that off, his half-sisters “didn’t want anything to do with my situation,” Tyson said. “They made promises to me that never happened.”
They returned, though, after Parade Magazine named him one of America’s top players, and local TV featured him.
“They tried to come back in my life,” he said, in a quiet voice, without bitterness. “Now I don’t let them.”
Those family members withdrew as recruiters descended. Feeling high about himself as a football player — “I got the big head” after picking Georgia — and worthless to his family, Tyson virtually dropped off the Statesboro team.
Pennington made Tyson clean out his locker, skip spring practice and told him he could return to the Blue Devils only if he got off the ego trip.
That led to Tyson’s reality check — about football, and another about his family quest.
He concluded he was wrong to inflate his worth in football and returned humble for his senior year.
“Most of the time, he was double- or triple-teamed, which took him out of the limelight,” Pennington said of last season. “But ‘D’ accepted that role with grace.”
Tyson also saw he was wrong thinking the thickest connection is always blood.
The Joseph’s home, founded by a Catholic nun, was named for the father of Jesus, who dealt with an unexpected family thrust upon him, too.
It was here that an older boy taught Tyson football. The staff saw him through his first prom, a knee injury his junior year — and so much more. Last month, he repeatedly showed up late to school, so the staff took away his cellphone.
“It’s made me a better person,” Tyson says now of the place that most formed him. “If I wasn’t here, I’d probably be somewhere doing something bad.”
Like prison?
“Or something worse.”
Now Tyson calls most of the boys brothers. For two years, he has reigned as the eldest, commanding their attention.
“Typically a boy arrives with no sense of the future, no goals, no view of next month or next week or tomorrow,” said the home’s clinical director, Ken Johnson. “It’s important for them to get a sense of a success path for them. ‘D’ is a beacon.”
Anyone could see it in the awed look of a little boy at dinner recently. He had been struggling to cut his steak, donated by Wal-Mart. Tyson took over, the knife dwarfed in his mitt-like hand, cutting pieces of meat small enough for the boy to eat safely.
Forget Georgia, and football, and the idea of a regular family.
Here, Tyson always mattered.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Categories: UGA
Fortson to choose between Auburn and FSU on signing day
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Carver, Columbus receiver Jarmon Fortson appeared to be a lock to sign with Auburn after committing to the Tigers nearly five months ago.
But following a late visit in January to Tallahassee, Fortson will now choose between Auburn and Florida State Wednesday morning.
“He still hasn’t decided,” Carver coach Dell McGee said late Wednesday evening. “He’ll decide Wednesday morning.”
Fortson’s Carver teammate DeRon Furr, who enrolled at Auburn in January, said it’s anybody’s guess which school the 6-foot-3 receiver will select.
“We’ll see [on Wednesday],” Furr said.
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First-year Lovejoy player Allen headed to Virginia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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In an era filled with junior commitments, Lovejoy defensive end Tory Allen managed to buck that trend.
The 6-foot-6, 210-pound Allen strapped on a chinstrap for the first time in his high school career in spring practice near the end of his junior season.
Allen’s senior campaign was enough to catch the interest of programs such as North Carolina, Mississippi State and Virginia.
On Tuesday, he committed to the Cavaliers.
“Tory is a real special athlete,” Lovejoy coach Al Hughes said. “He plays basketball and is a kid who can jump out of the gym.
“But he got to his senior year, looked around and didn’t see too many 6-foot-6 forwards or centers getting basketball scholarships.”
Despite playing just one special at Lovejoy, Allen made a quick impression on his coach.
“Five Division I defensive ends have come through here and he’s probably better than all of them,” Hughes said.
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Major recruit commits to Alabama
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Michigan star running back Mark Ingram, the son of former New York Giants star Mark Ingram, Sr., announce Tuesday afternoon that he will leave his home state of Michigan and attend Alabama. His dad went to Michigan State and the Spartans were the early favorite, but Alabama’s full-court press landed the speedy running back.
“Ingram was a kid who slipped under the radar for a while because we hadn’t got a good look at him,” said Rivals National Recruiting Analyst Jeremy Crabtree is is quoted on Bamaonline.com. “But when we did, we were very impressed. His junior film showed a lot of characteristics that we look for in elite running backs. He seemed to have it all: speed, balance, strength and size. Just overall he looked like an excellent prospect.”
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LSU: Waiting on a few last recruits; entertaining 6,000 fans tomorrow
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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The jambalaya will start flowing at 10 a.m. tomorrow as an estimated 6,000 fans will convene at the Baton Rouge River Center to hear Coach Les Miles give his take on this year’s recruiting class. Never mind that Miles probably will not start talking till 5:30 p.m.
This is big-time stuff: breakfast will start at 8:30 a.m., followed by the endless servings of jambalaya as of 10 .a.m. Tickets are $45 at the door and fans are encouraged to come and stay all day for recruiting updates, silent auctions and a chance to meet former LSU players.
If you’re not going, stay tuned here for the latest LSU updates, unfortunately sans jambalaya. LSU is waiting for a few big names, most notably offensive lineman Greg Shaw from Miami, Fla. He has narrowed his choices to West Virginia and LSU. Shaw will decide at noon tomorrow. He visited West Virginia last weekend and Tigerbait.com reported today that Shaw spoke with defensive line coach Earl Lane and Miles on Tuesday.
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5 schools in hunt for top-ranked Ala. WR
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Rivals.com is reporting that its top-ranked receiver, Julio Jones (Foley, Ala.) is expected to announce his choice at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Alabama, Florida and FSU are in the hunt, along with Oklahoma and Texas Tech. He was spotted in Tuscaloosa this past weekend, but Jones has not been talking about his preferences.
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Ward commits to Marshall
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Martin Ward, a 5-10, 195-pound running back at Mt. Zion (Jonesboro), committed to Marshall. Ward committed to Georgia his junior season, but de-committed last spring. He is the 24th-highest ranked running back in the country, according to Rivals.com
Permalink | Comments (19) | Categories: Other schools, UGA
