Skip to content
Rally High School Sports
Link copied to clipboard

High school football players expanding by leaps and pounds

THOSE GUYS WERE gigantic! With each step they took, the ground truly shook!

High school football players, like former George Washington star Sharrif Floyd, are bigger than they've ever been. (Clem Murray/Staff Photographer)
High school football players, like former George Washington star Sharrif Floyd, are bigger than they've ever been. (Clem Murray/Staff Photographer)Read more

THOSE GUYS WERE gigantic! With each step they took, the ground truly shook!

Yes, in the 1972 football season, most opponents of now-defunct St. James High in Chester learned to spell fear with a capital "F." How could they not?

The Bulldogs boasted size that had never been seen at a city-leagues high school. It was as if Paul Bunyan had moved into the area and talked three Bigfoots into joining him on the squad. Surely, a team with that many big-'uns would never exist again.

Um, check that.

The heaviest guy, according to the listed weights on the roster, was "only" 248 pounds. Thirty-eight seasons later, a guy that size risks being called a termite.

What the heck has happened?

"I don't know," said Joe Gallagher, the most celebrated of those St. James then-behemoths (at 6-3, 240) and now the longtime coach at Haverford High. "The kids have gotten bigger and bigger. My gut feeling is, we have to be at the end point, right? I mean, kids can only get so big before they won't be able to play."

We'll seeeeeee. Perhaps folks uttered those same thoughts generations ago.

In 1971, the long-gone Bulletin picked its first All-City squad and the Daily News joined the dole-out-honors club shortly thereafter. On that first All-City team, the five offensive linemen averaged 198 pounds. The average weight of the five o-linemen on the Daily News' 2009 squad? Exactly 100 pounds heavier.

Gallagher's response to that tidbit: "Ha ha ha ha ha! That's crazy! That . . . is . . . crazy!"

The average weight of the d-linemen ballooned over that same span from 214 to 269. The increases were not a new trend.

In 1939, when the Associated Press first picked an All-State team (not broken into offense/defense), the linemen averaged 180. The only 200-pounder was tackle Mike Jarmoluk, of Frankford, who weighed exactly that much. After starring at Temple, he wound up playing for 10 years in the NFL (at roughly 6-5, 250).

Prominent among those who see today's big guys up close - and hears about the others - is Malvin Carrion, the head outreach athletic trainer for Temple Sports Medicine.

Now in his 13th year, Carrion oversees trainers responsible for 32 schools in the Public and Catholic leagues; he handles Frankford, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison and his alma mater, Jules Mastbaum Tech.

"The size is definitely up, but this isn't a football-only issue," Carrion said. "It's a family/DNA issue. People are much heavier everywhere. In football, while the kids are bigger, they're also stronger and faster. Football's a lot more year-round now. And there are more training facilities where kids can go to work on power and velocity.

"When kids are very big and out of shape, yes, then you have a problem. That's when you see the knee and ankle problems. The lower half of the body can really be affected. But I don't see that much of 'a problem.' "

Carrion then mentioned that doctors are aware of how they need to keep a handle on kids' outrageous sizes.

"Some kids have been held back [from football] by their doctors for just being too big," he said. "Not a big percentage. But it definitely happens."

Said Dr. Gary Emmett, director of hospital pediatrics for Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, who played football in high school and college: "The weight of the players these days causes more injuries due to simple physics. You have 300 pounders hitting each other, as opposed to 200 pounders 40 years ago.

"The BMI [body mass index] of anyone weighing 300 pounds is going to be abnormal, and when it is, that spells problems. Forget about the short term and the possibility of suffering a violent injury. Long range, you're looking at the fact that anyone with a waist over 38 inches is 3 to 4 times as likely to develop diabetes and 3 to 4 times as likely to develop hypertension."

One of those shut-down guys was Frankford's top lineman last season, Tauheed Smith. The first-team All-City honoree checked in at 6-5, 350. Yes, 350. And he almost felt like a stick figure.

Before Smith entered the ninth grade at Frankford, he weighed 385 and his family physician refused to sign his athletic permission slip. Smith said he lost about 25 pounds in only 3 weeks and was given the go-ahead.

Twenty-five pounds in 3 weeks? When asked what he had eaten during that span, Smith, now playing football at Globe Technical Institute, a junior college in New York City, laughed and shot back, "I don't remember eating."

He then added, "Nah, my dad had me eating tuna fish straight out of the can. Yup, out of the can. That was about it.

"I was mad at my doctor, at first. Then again, it fell on me, because I'd let myself get that big. From that day forward, I started eating right and working out more. He told me it was unhealthy to be that size, and that I could die from it. Hey, I didn't want to die because of my size."

Kwame Miller can do Smith many pounds better. Now a 6-6, 380-pound junior tackle at Germantown, he weighed - make sure you're sitting down - 530 while in the eighth grade at Lingelbach School.

"My dad is a bodybuilder, but I was always going behind his back," Miller said. "Really, my problem wasn't food as much as juice. Always drinking juice.

"In my head, I didn't think of myself as being that bad, truthfully. I used to watch 'Maury' and they had people on there who were so heavy, they couldn't get out of bed. I was going to school every day. Moving around. I was OK, I thought.

"But once I realized I had to change things around, I've been going down and down and down. I'm watching my sugar intake. Working out more. It's not easy - there's a pizza store right up from our field - but I lose 2 pounds here, 3 there, maybe 1 the next week. It's better that way than a whole bunch in a hurry. If you lose too much at once, it hurts your muscle mass and strength."

In '94, St. Joseph's Prep d-lineman Dwayne Carey, at 6-4, 370, drew size-related attention en route to earning second-team All-City laurels. He weighed a distressing 400-plus shortly before that season.

Now in material management for a bio-pharmaceutical firm, Carey says he goes about 345 and stands a whisker short of 6-5. After starring at Florida A & M, he enjoyed a brief indoor football career.

"Now I have perspective," Carey said. "I know the tremendous harm carrying so much weight can bring. I was oblivious then. I've been blessed. I don't have any [health problems]. I feel as good now as I did then. Though I was very big as a kid, I had a lot of friends and was always very active. I didn't sit around.

"After I saw I couldn't make it to that next level [NFL], I was pretty depressed for a while. The birth of my son, in '02, got me back on the right path."

The city's largest-ever player was Job Lawson, who was listed at 6-11, 355, when he played for Frankford in the 2000 season. Just two falls later, St. John Neumann's offensive grunts included four guys who weighed at least 300 - Ed McDuffie, Tom McCarron, Joey Sandefur, Marques Slocum - and a comparative will-o'-the-wisp in Kevin Harrigan (240). The tight end, Al Meacham, went 280. Slocum, who finished his high school career at West Catholic, recently had a shot with the Washington Redskins.

On the memorable St. James squad, which crushed Frankford, 42-0, for the City Title to finish as the first 12-0 squad in Philly-leagues history, only four guys were truly heavy. In addition to Gallagher, a tackle and defensive end, there was tackle Frank Finn (248), plus a pair of defensive tackles, Jim Clough (243) and Gerard Remaley (231). Only one guy on Frankford's entire roster, star lineman Rich Geiger (at 205), was even 200 pounds.

"I still remember Geiger's number. It was 75," Gallagher said correctly. (Geiger's son, Ryan, now a line stalwart at La Salle, goes 6-1, 260.)

Gallagher played at Tennessee and was productive enough to make the Blue-Gray Classic. His older brother, Frank, spent 7 years at guard in the NFL (after St. James and North Carolina) while going 6-2, 245.

"When I was playing," Joe said, "there was no emphasis on getting bigger. For us, it just happened. Our big guys were from different parishes. There was no plan. Just a freakish coincidence.

"This was an era when weight training wasn't that big of a deal and when guys still played multiple sports. As I look at it, if we were around nowadays, we'd be even bigger. Kind of scary to think about it, really."

To some degree, Gallagher and his fellow sun blotter-outers resented that so much attention was paid to their size. They thought people muttered behind their backs, "They're good only because of that."

Gallagher then mentioned a recent strange development. Shortly after the City Title game, he said, the players watched a game film that somehow disappeared soon thereafter. Then, only a month ago, he said, a DVD of the game was placed in the mailbox of offensive coordinator Bob Ewing, who later enjoyed success as Cardinal O'Hara's head coach.

"Bob said there was no return address on the envelope," Gallagher reported. "No explanation. The note just said, 'Coach Ewing - this is for you.' Right after Bob let me have the DVD, I went down to Cape May on vacation and had a visit with my teammate, Gary Barnes [the All-City center at 170].

"We watched the tape together and you know what? And this is the truth. Our big guys were really good athletes. Since I've been a coach all these years, I really analyzed our play, especially the big guys. We were much more than just big guys. We could play. Seeing that made me feel pretty good."