When Tom Brady was a linebacker
"He could hit people...He wasn't a pushover."
For Patriots fans, the last thing they want to imagine is Tom Brady stepping on a football field to try and make a tackle. The 39-year-old quarterback, arguably the greatest in NFL history, is a commodity of incalculable value.
Of course, Brady’s high school coaches once felt differently.
“When you’re younger and you’re a quarterback, they make you do defensive stuff too,” recalled Brady’s high school teammate, John Kirby, in a recent interview. “I can remember freshman and sophomore year when we’d have to switch and do defensive drills. I’d do defensive back stuff and he’d be with the linebackers. He was a little stockier than most of the receivers, so they put him at linebacker.”
Brady and Kirby played together at Junípero Serra High School in California from 1991-1994. And on the freshman team, the greatest player in Patriots history was deemed a “face in the crowd” by his coach. That meant that he, like everyone else, played both on offense and defense.
So how was Tom Brady as a linebacker?
“I can remember that he could hit,” Kirby said. “He could hit people. I remember him going up against our fullbacks, and he could lay some wood. He wasn’t a pushover.”
In fact, Brady craved the contact.
“He always wanted to line up against our big fullback. They’re actually still buddies, I believe. And they would just line up before the coaches came out.”
Brady famously was deemed not good enough to start at quarterback on the freshman team, which ignominiously went 0-8-1. By the time he became a sophomore and moved up to the junior varsity team, his work ethic began to change minds.
Along with Kirby, they became starters on the JV team. With Brady at quarterback, coaches quickly realized the potential that was on display. As the team began to win, Brady’s brief moment as a linebacker came to a close. Of course, it wasn’t because he wanted it to.
“That wasn’t so much him,” Kirby said of Brady’s departure from defensive duties. “There’s a part of him that probably loved defense and loved hitting people, because that’s what I saw at times. It was kind of what the coaches saw in him as a quarterback. At some point they said, ‘No, no, no. No more defense. We don’t want you getting hurt.’”
By the end of his second year in high school, Brady’s path was clear. He had a future at quarterback and his linebacker career was over.
“After his sophomore year, there was no more playing around on defense,” said Kirby.
With that decision, the high school coaches at Junipero Serra inadvertently enabled the eventual flourishing of a New England football dynasty.
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