Ballard’s Trent Clavey is a killer. On the football field he is a hard-charging, mass of down hill attack.
Clavey drives first level guys deep into the 2nd and 3rd levels. He runs his feet through the whistle. He latches on and gains leverage, shocks the defender with his devastating punch, and controls him with a vice like grip. Well, that is what his highlights show this author.
Now Ballard has him at LT. That is where a team deploys its most athletic and skilled offensive lineman owing to the responsibility of guarding the QB’s blind-side in the case of the team’s starting a right-hander at QB like, let’s say, Ballard’s Larry Cummings, Jr.
Clavey is being recruited hard by teams like Kentucky Wesleyan, Indian Wesleyan, and West Virginia State University. Before this process is finished we suspect there will be suitors from both FCS and FBS schools too.
Clavey is 6-1, 280-pounds and anchors down the left side for Ballard. Trent doesn’t project to play LT in college. Clavey will either slide down to guard/center or play defense, along an interior front.
Clavey is a one-way player in HS. Kentucky 6A teams don’t have two-way players for the most part. It is rare for any player in 6A to see action on both sides of the football and, if one should, it wouldn’t be a lineman It would be a skill.
Now Clavey has been rated 19th on this preseason’s top-30 list of Kentucky high school offensive linemen. This was an example of an undervaluing in this magazine’s estimation.
After all, Clavey, by the time the list had been published to BGR (Bluegrass Rivals) by its author and architect, had already been to the Best of the Midwest Combine in Indianapolis, Indiana. He had already been featured in a 247Sports article about being among that combine’s top performers and had already been selected, by the combine’s faculty, as one of the two MVP’s for the OL position group.
Trent Clavey is an example of the difference between a football player and a prospect. We say this conceding he is both, but we would call him a football player first.
For players like Clavey, who some college recruiters will call an inch or two too short for their roster, his best selling-point, even over and above any combine, is to roll the film or watch him play on Friday nights. His on-field prowess best sells him.
No matter how good Trent is at a combine, and not just anyone can roll into the BOMW and waltz away with an OL MVP-award, to fully appreciate him you have to watch him play the damn game. You see, in the end, and before it is said and done, somebody is going to have to strap on a chin-strap and hit a man. Football is a physical sport, this isn’t interpretive dance.
You can look All-world, strutting around a combine with your handler in shorts, shirts, and tennis shoes. You can even go pretty far toward your college destination goals on just passing the eye-test, without even having to compete, sadly. For lots of colleges these days its basically a swim-suit competition in a beauty pageant.
However, remember this…on almost any FBS roster of 85-scholarship players you pick, about 40 of the roster-spots are occupied by kids elite at playing football. The other 45 or so are sideline ghosts who don’t contribute much more to game-day than you or I, they just have better seats. After a few years, fans wonder (sometimes out-loud) just which idiot on their favorite team’s coaching staff offered this stiff.
Trent Clavey is 0% runway model and 100% football player. Magazines like ours, who cover the people who strap it on and battle, are going to always favor guys like Trent Clavey. We suspect the Ballard coaching staff would heartily agree with our characterization of this star. We further suspect they favor the Trent Clavey types too.
This is Coach HB Lyon, reporting for KPGFootball, and we’re JUST CALLING IT LIKE WE SEE IT!
If you enjoyed this article and wish to gain full-access to the site, then subscribe monthly to Kentucky Prep Gridiron by following the prompts!
© The information contained on this site is the copyrighted intellectual property of KPGFootball. Any unauthorized dissemination of this material without the author’s express written consent is strictly prohibited!
Leave a Reply