Redmond still learning
Midwest City’s Jalen Redmond focused on basketball until football coaches talked him into suiting up. Once he did, scholarship offers started coming in waves.
MIDWEST CITY — Jalen Redmond has never really looked like a high school basketball player.
Even when he broke in as a freshman, starting for the Midwest City basketball team, he was built like a linebacker with a well-defined 6-foot-4 frame.
Make no mistake, he has plenty of basketball talent, and has been a key player for the Bombers over the last three seasons. His body type just doesn’t match up with the long and lean look most basketball players have at his age.
Yet for his first two years of high school, Redmond was a basketball player, and only that. He had brushed football aside to focus on taking hoops to the next level.
It wasn’t until Midwest City coaches convinced him to give football another shot in the spring of his sophomore year that he finally put the pads back on.
And nothing has been the same since.
Memphis saw him at a spring football practice and offered a scholarship shortly after — three months before Redmond would play his first high school game.
“I had people who saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself,” Redmond, who is ranked No. 6 on The Oklaho
man’s Super 30 recruit rankings for the 2018 class. “It gave me a lot of motivation.”
After his 82-tackle, 14-sack junior season, offers flooded in for the 6-foot-4, 230-pound Redmond, who can play outside linebacker or defensive end.
He played both positions last year, depending on whether the Bombers were using a threeor four-man defensive front, and this season will likely be the same.
“We’ll make ( opponents) have to game plan for him,” Midwest City coach Darrell Hall said. “He won’t be in the same spot. They won’t know, ‘OK, he’s the strongside end or strongside ‘backer every time.’
“There are places we can put him where we can put people in mismatch situations with Jalen.”
Redmond still plays basketball, and it aided the recruiting process, giving coaches a chance to see his speed and explosiveness. With Arizona State coaches in the crowd last January, Redmond had six dunks in the game, and got a Sun Devil offer afterward.
With nearly 20 offers from programs like Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Nebraska, Kansas State, Notre Dame, Georgia, Colorado and TCU, Redmond isn’t in a hurry to make a decision. And he knows he’s behind the curve in learning the techniques of playing his position after sitting out two years.
“I missed out on a lot of that stuff,” he said. “If I could go back, I would’ve kept playing. But I just pick up what I can. I think it’s an advantage for me, because I know I haven’t reached my full potential yet.”