Hendricken junior has wide appeal
WARWICK -- The world changed for Will Blackmon last June.

Until then he was just another Rhode Island high school football player. A good one, certainly; one of the top sophomores in the Interscholastic League, certainly; someone who seemed destined to one day hear a lot of Saturday afternoon cheers, certainly. But a Rhode Island high school football player nonetheless.

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Until then he was a minority kid trying to find his way at Hendricken, an overwhelmingly white school that on this afternoon looks like something out of a suburban dream, teams on the green fields behind the school, kids' cars in the parking lot, like a snippet from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He had completed his second year, the culture shock was over, but every day he was reminded that he spent his days far from the inner-city Providence of his childhood.

Until then he also was just another Rhode Island high school athlete who thought that no big-time college football school was ever going to really see him, because this was Rhode Island, right? And everyone knows that big-time football players that come out of here are few and far between. He knew he had football ability, but he had no clue to what that really meant, how far it might take him.

Then he went to the Boston College football camp.

And the world changed.

"They offered me a scholarship on the spot," says Blackmon.

BC is not alone. Just the first.

Syracuse, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Iowa and URI also have offered scholarships. Notre Dame has said it's going to recruit him hard. Florida, Duke, Michigan State and Virginia are involved. Every day there seems to be another suitor at the door, offering roses and candy, whispering promises in his ear.

"I've been here 25 years and I've never seen anything like it," says Hendricken coach Ron Mosca. "Every day I spend two hours in the morning calling everyone who called the day before."

What scouts like is Blackmon's athleticism. The fact that he's already 6-foot-1 and 183 pounds and is only 16 years old. The fact that he conceivably could play four positions in college -- running back, wide receiver, corner back and safety. The fact that he's a sprinter, all-state this past winter as part of a Hendricken relay team. The fact that, in Mosca's words, Blackmon hasn't even come close to tapping his potential.

Blackmon arrived at Hendricken in the ninth grade. His father, Wayne, was thrilled, for he knew that if his son went to Hendericken he would be almost assured of one day going to college. Blackmon's mother had died when he was 6, and Blackmon says his father always has stressed academics to him. Academics and football. Working hard. Doing well.

But on his first day at Hendricken he was sitting at a cafeteria by himself. He was one of the few black kids in the school, and he felt like he had parachuted into some strange country.

"There were more white people than I'd ever been around in my life," he says. "Seriously."

And it wasn't simply that the overwhelmingly majority of the other kids were a different race. They also had money. The kind of money he didn't have. The kind of money they seemed to wear. So there he was sitting all by himself that first day, hating it, wondering what he was doing here at this school that could have been as far away as the moon as far as he was concerned, when Mosca brought him down to the locker room to show him some football equipment. That was the beginning. Football as comfort level.

Then again, football was something he'd been playing since he was 5 years old, when he played flag football for the West Elmwood Intruders near his home in the Washington Park section of Providence. Then it was on to the Edgewood Eagles. Football was familiar, one of the passports he used to make the adjustment to Hendricken, this white world that initially had seemed so alien.

That first year he played freshman football.

The offense? Will left. Will right. Will up the middle. Hendricken already knew they had a star in the making.

"I knew he was going to be good," Mosca says. "But not like this."

For Blackmon already has achieved a rare status in Rhode Island high school football, the simple reason being that so very few local kids ever go through this kind of recruiting experience. Especially at the skill positions. Run through the past few decades and only a couple of names jump out. Mike Cloud of Portsmouth, Buddy Rodgers of East Providence. Maybe a couple of others. But it's an exclusive list, and now Blackmon is on it.

As a sophomore he made all-league. This past fall he made All-State, even though the team struggled and he missed three games. But it was that one camp at Boston College, that one week in June, that changed everything and now has Joe Paterno calling Ron Mosca. That one week that's now opened up an entire new world for Blackmon, where possibilities are lined up like tackling dummies.

And what does it all mean to this 16-year-old who is just beginning to realize that football has become more than just the game he used to play for the Edgewood Eagles, that it now has the potential to change his life, take him places?

"I know that you only get one chance in football," says Will Blackmon. "And this is my chance."

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