If you weren’t working to get better, you may soon discover (to your chagrin) the guy across from you was…
Obviously, this isn’t our first time telling you about Breathitt County’s Kory Combs. We don’t know where anyone else has him ranked but he is the Class of 2025’s top-rated linebacker in all of Kentucky according to us.
Who would know better than we? That’s a rhetorical question, you don’t have to answer. We both already know.
Combs made our MS All-State Football team as only a 7th-grader. Seventh-graders don’t make that team often as it is heavily weighted toward the eighth-grade counterparts. Still, guys like Cole Hodge and Joshuah Keith made the team as 7th-graders in 2018, so Kory is already in elite company.
I knew a football coach who had a saying about the offseason. Now, I am going to have to clean this up a little bit, this is a family magazine.
He used to say football creates both predators and prey. With every single snap of the football, either you or the guy across from you emerges as one of those two. The decision as to which of the two you will be, in any singular season, is made in the offseason.
The guys who put in the work, get to storm around the field, imposing their will on the weaker items of prey, like some sort of lion. The guys who decided TV and potato chips were a good expense of time are soon to learn how fun football is for the antelope which finds itself in a company of a lion.
When it come to blunt force trauma, it is far better to give than to receive. Lions like football. Do Prey-items like wart-hogs or antelope or anything else regularly eaten by Lions? Well, let’s just say the game isn’t nearly as fun when you’re terrified of being devoured as it is when you are the one doing the devouring.
Kory measures around 5-11 entering the 8th-grade and weighs in the 180-190-lb range. His father, Kenneth “Shorty” Combs, pictured above with Kory, was an All-American at LB for the Colonels of EKU after having been an All-Stater at Breathitt County High School.
Linebackers are born. Kory was born a linebacker. He has a predatory mentality on the football field. Predators prepare for battle. Prey-animals lie around hoping to avoid the confrontation; hoping that day never comes.
So how good is this kid really? Well, in talking with members of the Breathitt County High School football coaching staff there are more than one who believe he would be a candidate to start for the varsity-Cats in 2020, were he not an 8th-grader. There is not a single member of the staff who doesn’t believe he would play enough to earn a varsity-letter.
If you will look at the picture attached to this feature, it is his work ethic which comprises why he is already ready for Friday night. In the middle of a pandemic imposed “Dead Period” Kory has found ways to improve himself physically.
We are told Kory has a weight bench with a few weights at his house. We are also told he has undergone an exhaustive regimen of calisthenics and has run miles and miles of hills.
The bottom-line…he’s not lying around crying the KHSAA won’t allow him to workout. If you are doing that, we both know you are finding excuses for why you aren’t doing what we both know you wouldn’t be doing anyway; even if you could access your school’s weight-room.
Winners find solutions. Winners don’t let things get in the way of their objectives. Losers make excuses.
Kory Combs is a winner. Kory Combs is a predator. Kory Combs doesn’t let anything get in his way of reaching his objectives. Kory Combs doesn’t make excuses. Kory Combs is the best linebacker, in his class, in the entire commonwealth of Kentucky.
We are quite capable of differentiating between a predator and his prey both on and off a football field. We also know a lion when we are seeing one.
This is Coach HB Lyon, reporting for KPGFootball, and we’re JUST CALLING IT LIKE WE SEE IT!
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