The Locker Room

By: Alex Benson

High School

People always ask me what I see when I look at a young kid and how do we know he will turn out to be a good player in the future. Well their are some key factors that we look at but unfortunately for the readers of this article we aren’t going to give out the secret recipe so till that day happens you are going to just have to take our word on it. Now back to what I was trying to get at earlier. There are some kids that you see and you know right off the bat how good they are going to be. Dominick Blaylock was that type of kid. He possessed unreal athletic ability, we just didn’t know how physical he would be but lucky for him it doesn’t matter as his high school team, the Walton Raiders put him at Wide Receiver instead of running back which he was playing in middle school. All summer he tore throught the 7v7 circuit and now with the biggest game of the year against Etowah, Dominick Blaylock put on a show. He had 224 yards receiving and 3 TD’s and that’s against a top ten ranked team in the state. Not to bad for a freshman.

Two other freshman that have been playing lights out are Zack Gibson from Johns Creek and Jaylen McCullough with Hillgrove. With Zack it was easy to see his breakout coming, he just needed an opportunity to show how good he was and thats just what he did Friday night as he led Johns Creek to an upset over Alpharetta with over 300 yards rushing and 4 TD’s. Jaylen was a different story, not from a talent standpoint because he won B2C Player of the Year at the 12U Division and also made the B2C Prime 100 for the top 100 freshman in the country. What we didn’t know is that he would be able to play RB at the second level because he was making the switch to DB from LB. Well an opportunity came up for him to get some playing time as a freshman running the ball and he has soared as he has had multiple 100 yard games and has to be considered as a Freshman All American lock if he continues to put up these type of numbers.

Youth

8th Grade
Archer is a scary team as their offense looks phenomenal and their defense gets timely stops. Tyler Roach is the truth but now his teammates are stepping up big including the Quarterback Carter Peevy and Trey Messer. That might be the deadliest combination in the southeast.

6th Grade
North Paulding is starting to look like an unbeatable team. On a day when they didn’t have to rely heavily on their passing game they went to their ground game and were very productive doing it against a very good Hillgrove team.

8U Division
CJ Heard from the Atlanta Ducks has won multiple B2C Player of the Year awards and now has a chance to join Rico Frye as the only person ever to win the award three years in a row. It will be very difficult with the emergence of Manier McClain from Welcome All but with the way CJ is now playing on defense he might just have the nod over McClain. They will eventually get a chance to go head to head again down the road. Maybe in the B2C Championship Series, either way that doesn’t matter now as Heard was on the big stage against the North Atlanta Giants this past weekend and had a great game on offense and defense. North Atlanta is going to be a very good team in the years to come as they remind me of the Forsyth Paladins that were led by Coach Heath Hawk years ago. They ended up winning the B2C Championship Series in a thriller against the Atlanta Vikings when they were 10U.

7U Division
Decatur Army Camo is one of those teams that just know how to win. It seems like all close games they come out on top and that what happened again this past weekend as they battled the Atlanta Tigers tooth and nail to a 14-13 double overtime victory.