Size and mobility.
It's what every college football coach is looking for.
Godwin Heights' Ru'Quan Buckley is six feet six inches tall and weighs 280 pounds, but he fell in love with the game at a much smaller size.
“I used to run on the track a lot and I met this rocket league football coach, he asked did I want to play football, I said yeah," Buckley remembers about how he got started with football. "I go to the camp the first day and it was competition and I just loved it, I kept on playing it because I kept on winning the competition.”
That was at age seven.
Now he's a high school senior and very nimble for his size.
Buckley plays on the Wolverines basketball team too and the multiple sports don't end there.
“My dad used to run me a lot and he practiced boxing with me downstairs in the basement so I feel like that helped too," Buckley said. "Since I used to run a lot it made me faster than all of my lineman teammates. Also basketball with the jumping it helped me a lot, I could dunk too.”
Colleges have noticed. 13 of the 14 Big Ten schools have offered him a scholarship as well as programs from the SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Pac 12.
If the high school football season ends up in the spring, Godwin Heights head coach Brandan Kimble says playing might not be the best option for a player with Buckley's future.
“We are going to have a really honest conversation about a kid like him playing in the spring," Kimble said. "If he is going to report to a school in June, it would break my heart if something seriously happened to him in the spring. I think we have to get the schedule the MHSAA is going to give us in the spring and then we have got to have some real conversations.”
For Buckley a lot is going into his college choice.
He hasn't been able to visit all the schools he has wanted to because of COVID-19. Plus, education is a plying a big role, Buckley wants to study software engineering.
"My mom tells me it is whatever I decide," Buckley said. "She tells me whatever the best education for what I want to study if I want to do engineering to go to a school that is best at engineering.”
Buckley plans to commit on October 14th which is his birthday.
