There are some middle school players who are unknown outside their own counties. Then there are the ‘Jayden Justices’ who seem to be Kentucky household words even before reaching 9th-grade. Justice is considered by many around the commonwealth as Kentucky’s top LBer among ’27s. If he isn’t, he isn’t too far off.
Fletcher Long, KPGFootball Editorial Board member
Jayden Justice is a rising 8th-grader. We found it important to iterate that because he gets talked about in football circles across Kentucky like a Greek hero from the Trojan War.
Mingua Beef Jerky awarded him the Protein-packed Performer of the Week on this very site for his play in the 6th-grade Future Stars Classic in June of 2021. We have above linked you to that article.
Needless to say, 6th-graders don’t generally get features on KPGFootball. To be a sixth-grader with such a write up puts the recipient in the rarest of company.
We believe Kylan Combs (’27, Breathitt) and Jayden Justice are the two best linebackers in Kentucky at their grade-level. Both of these players tend to “show up” at every upper-level event hosted within Kentucky and bordering states.
Justice was the Future Stars’ Defensive MVP in the 6th-grade game a year ago, made the FBU select team in both 2020 and 2021, and was a two-time 3rd-place finalist in the Kentucky Middle School wrestling tournament in both ’21 and ’22.
These are just the honors Justice thought to include within his Twitter profile. We have no doubt there are others.
Justice reminds us of Austin Gough, who formerly prepped at Owensboro Senior and is now a Kentucky Wildcat. Justice has good lateral movement, spacial quickness, and explosive, quick-twitch coming up into the run box.
Justice scrapes up and down the line of scrimmage well making plays with both speed and quickness. Unlike most middle school LBers, Justice is able to drop into coverage and take away the intermediate passing routes in addition to what he brings to the run box.
We think it very likely Justice will stay at LBer when he reaches high school. We think it equally likely Justice will mature into a college, second level defender too.
Until then, he has quite a bit of football left to play; starting with middle school this coming Fall. We bet there is a high school roster just itching to gain his inclusion and eligibility.
This is Coach HB Lyon, reporting for KPGFootball, and we’re JUST CALLING IT LIKE WE SEE IT!
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