Sometimes, all it takes is that one hit.
It’s the same principle that applies to boxing and mixed martial arts, that “puncher’s chance” that can change the outcome of someone’s night in just a fraction of a second.
When Plant City High School senior Jyquis Thomas took his hit, however, the impact went beyond the playing field. It spread all over the place, into college scouts’ notebooks, and nearly cost him a shot at playing for his favorite school.
“It was at the Hillsborough Fall Classic preseason game last year,” Thomas says. “I was playing running back and defense then. We were on offense, and it was the second drive of the game when I got hit.”
Typical football play: Thomas took a hard shot to the ribcage and went down. In a lot of those situations, the player just has the wind knocked out of him and might miss a snap.
And, perhaps the worst part about that hit was that it seemed so innocuous that night. Thomas left the game after he began to cramp up, but he thought that that was the extent of it. After the game, while he was at home, he began to have trouble breathing.
Thomas waited until Saturday to go to the hospital, and he was floored by the diagnosis — a collapsed lung.
“None of us had any idea he was injured,” assistant head coach Greg Meyer says. “He didn’t have trouble breathing until after the game, so we were shocked on Saturday morning when we heard about it.”
There are more serious injuries to be had in football — Thomas missed six games before returning — but freak occurrences such as this still pose a problem when your future’s on the line.
THERE AND BACK AGAIN
Prior to the lung injury, Thomas was generating a good deal of interest from Division I programs such as Indiana, Rutgers and Miami. Temple, where Thomas ended up signing on Wednesday, was absolutely smitten.
And for good reason. Listed at 6-foot-1, Thomas is taller than the average defensive back. He’s got good speed and can be an elusive tackler. An example of this was seen with Thomas’ two consecutive sacks in the final game against Gaither, when he seemingly appeared out of thin air like Nightcrawler from the X-Men.
Of all the latest football trends, he fits in with the most successful one: sticking big, fast players in the secondary. In fact, the U saw enough potential in his frame to recruit him at outside linebacker, where they presumably would have had him bulk up from his current 184 pounds. But that lung injury threw a wrench into many schools’ plans — many of the bigger schools didn’t have a lot of information on Thomas before the injury to make an evaluation, and many did not want to take a chance on a kid with an injury history like that.
Temple wanted him to be its new stud DB, and Thomas liked what he had seen on his visit. Just when he had considered committing to be an Owl and was preparing to take his SAT, one of the bigger schools swooped in.
“School X* wanted him to come visit the school for a weekend, when Temple wanted him to take his SAT that Saturday,” Meyer says. “But, he would come back from the visit on Sunday.”
School X’s coaches encouraged Thomas to simply skip the SAT and come up for a campus visit. They assured him that everything would be fine — no problem. And, of course, the plot thickened.
“When he got to School X, they failed to deliver on their promises,” Meyer says. “And Temple had told (Thomas), ‘We have to move on,’ so we had to go back to Temple and put everything back together.”
In the end, Temple renewed its interest in Thomas, he took his SAT at a later date, and everything was made right.
“I can’t wait to get up there, ball out and put Plant City on the map,” he says.
Thomas might have gotten lucky there, and the roller-coaster experience was a good lesson for he and Meyer. Though, in Meyer’s case, this lesson became a teaching tool.
FAST STARTS AND FALSE HOPES
With two years at Plant City to his name, Meyer has already donned a few hats for the football program. He’s currently the defensive coordinator and assistant head coach and says recruiting makes the latter position a real doozy.
“That’s my job, as assistant head coach — I’m doing recruiting stuff year-round,” Meyer says. “As soon as I get done with Signing Day, I have to get right to work on my (class of) 2015 kids, so that we can stay ahead of the curve.”
He remembers a time when things were slower, and scouts waited until later in a player’s high school career to show up. Pure luck, he says, was needed to even have a coach talk to seniors. With the Internet and all the possibilities it affords to those with an interest in recruits, the process has all but rendered the average junior or senior invisible.
“It’s become so over-competitive that the concept of letting a kid develop into his senior year is considered a gamble,” Meyer says. “The pressure this recruiting war puts on these college coaches makes the recruiting war even more cutthroat, and some of these coaches lose sight of what’s in the best interest of the kids, rather than the program.”
That may not even be a character flaw in the humans, but the nature of the beast they’ve created. This makes it difficult for bigger schools to maintain interest in older players such as Thomas: If he gets hurt, there are many raw, younger players to choose from that are just as talented, if not more.
In a way, the process has athletes such as Thomas unintentionally building up false hopes, only to have them broken down once a snag is hit.
“It puts an extra burden on us, as coaches, to step in and take care of our players,” Meyer says. “We now have to do more background work than what was ever needed before.”
Thomas usually led by example on the field, and his story now serves as an example for Raiders of the present and future to follow off the field: Rolling the dice is running a risk.
* Editor’s note: The name of this school has been omitted to preserve anonymity.
Contact Justin Kline at jkline@plantcityobserver.com.
STARTING THEM YOUNG
When Greg Meyer says college coaches are recruiting younger kids each year, he’s not exaggerating.
Linebacker Dylan Moses, who was 15 years old at the time, made waves in July 2012 when LSU gave him an offer. Later that month, eighth-grader-to-be Tate Martell one-upped Moses and had an offer accepted by Washington.
And, to top it all off, quarterback David Sills had been recruited on the West Coast since age 11 and committed to Southern Cal in 2010 — as a seventh-grader.
It’s one thing for Blue State U. to one-up rival Red College in the high school recruiting game, but the insistence of major programs to quickly make offers to middle-schoolers and high school freshmen is something that never fails to mystify everyone on the outside.