Football is a hard game and it's not meant for everyone. It takes a different type of personality to go through the day-to-day physical grind and a really different type of personality to actually enjoy that grind.
Enter Lexington (Ohio) star Cade Stover.
The 6-foot-5, 225-pound linebacker/defensive end prospect is one of the state of Ohio's most heavily recruited rising juniors. The class of 2019 standout holds early offers from Ohio State, Oklahoma, Penn State, Virginia Tech, and many more, making him a hot commodity right now on the recruiting trail.
The measurables jump off the page when you look at Stover, but there are a lot of great athletes around the state of Ohio who don't boast Stover's offer list. A closer look at Stover and the way he carries himself makes it easy to see why college coaches are already sold on a kid who comes from a less heralded part of the state and who has not yet played a down of his junior season.
That's because Stover has a work ethic that can't be found just anywhere. A work ethic that didn't just appear out of thin air. A work ethic that has been ingrained in him since he could walk.
Stover is a farm boy and that means grown man responsibilities, even as a youth. Stover's family owns a farm about an hour north of Columbus (Ohio) as well as a butcher shop. Approximately 120 head of black angus cattle and about a dozen pigs and it's all on the football star and his family to keep it running.
"We don't have any hired hands on the farm," Stover told BuckeyeGrove.com during an in-person interview in the spring. "It's just me, my dad, my mom and my little sisters. We do all of the work."
That means early mornings and long days for Stover. While other kids are sleeping in or going out with their friends, Stover's life of farming and sports, he also plays basketball both at the high school and AAU levels, leaves him with little down time. But the four-star prospect doesn't complain about the work on the farm. In fact, he enjoys it. Even the parts that normal people might find completely unappealing.
"I love everything honestly," he said of working the farm. "There's nothing about it that really sucks. Baling hay in the summer, cleaning out barns, every night feeding the cows, those are some things that maybe other people wouldn't like or would think might be hard."
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Stover finds the good in everything he does on the farm. Some of those things help him on the football field on Friday nights.
"Baling hay is probably my favorite thing," he said. "Just square baling hay. Just the natural strength you build up by doing things like that, it's unreal."
When you work a farm year-round, the extra work that football entails just doesn't seem as difficult. The discipline it takes to run a farm isn't so different from the discipline it takes to build a successful football team. A few days of complacency and the whole operation can collapse. Stover's experiences on his family farm have made him an excellent student of the game on the football field.
"He is a dream for a coach," Lexington head football coach Taylor Gerhardt said. "He comes from a family of hard workers with high family values. He has a great support system at home. He has very high expectations put on him not only as a player but as a student and as a person. He is just one of those kids that don't come around very often that has the size, the talent, as well as the intelligence and he's a humble kid."
As his responsibilities on the farm have increased with age, so have his responsibilities on the football field. Little by little, Stover has picked up the Lexington defense, learning numerous positions. He's the unquestioned leader of his team as his junior season looms.
"As a freshman we really limited what we asked him to do and just asked him to be an athlete," Gerhardt explained. "Last year, we started adding things towards the end of the year because he had a very heavy senior presence around him. He was able to feed off of those guys. I'm very comfortable with him being my field general this next year as a junior because he has great game awareness and football knowledge. He doesn't shy away from hard work or butt chewings. He understands that football is an intense game and he knows how to handle himself and turn that into positive things."
Football recruiting is an inexact science. In a sport where batting fifty-percent on a recruiting class makes a coach a world-class talent evaluator, kids fail at the next level for all sorts of reasons. Stover's talent level, combined with the attitude and work ethic he developed growing up on the family farm, makes him a safer bet than most.
