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Tyrod Taylor: Boys athlete of the year

Daily Press

Call it a gentleman's agreement, one Tyrod Taylor wouldn't have minded breaking. That is, had he not been a gentleman.

It was last summer, a few months before his senior season with Hampton High's football team was to begin. The Crabbers returned a good amount of talent, but they were thin at wide receiver. So Taylor went to work recruiting his buddy P.J. Hicks, an athletic swingman on the school's basketball team.

The deal: If Hicks came out for football, where he'd be a natural wideout, Taylor would play basketball in the winter.
"I was going to take the winter off," Taylor said. "But I didn't want to break a promise."

Six weeks after football season ended in the first round of the Eastern Region playoffs, Taylor traded his cleats for hightops. Playing in 15 of Hampton's 26 games, Taylor averaged 17.1 points as a shooting guard. It followed another productive season on the football field, where he accounted for 2,326 yards and 36 touchdowns.

Since the Daily Press began choosing athletes of the year in 1987, only three males had won in consecutive years: Tabb's Terry Kirby and Hampton's Ronald Curry (both of whom won three in a row) and Bruton's Bryan Randall. Taylor becomes the fourth.

"He's a good guy to have around," Crabbers football coach Mike Smith said in something of an understatement. "He's a great kid. He has good leadership qualities and a real future. He's been a big factor for us at Hampton High School."

With Taylor as its starting quarterback over the last three seasons, Hampton went 34-4 and won the Group AAA Division 5 championship in 2005. With Taylor as their starting shooting guard over the last three seasons, the Crabbers went 54-24 and made the Eastern Region playoffs each year.

In this age of specialization, the multi-sport athlete is becoming almost extinct. But growing up watching Curry make the transition seem almost effortless, and hearing about what Allen Iverson did at Bethel, Taylor had his mind made up long ago to do double duty.

"They opened a lot of pathways for young guys like myself," Taylor said. "I came up watching Ronald Curry, and my father showed me tapes of Allen Iverson when he played. I tried to mold my game to suit theirs. I tried to take their game and combine it with mine."

Taylor grew up a Crabber, so from the start he understood the tradition. His father, Rodney, is a 1985 Hampton graduate who played running back for Smith. As Tyrod leaves for Virginia Tech, where he expects to redshirt this fall, he knows he has made his mark.

"I got a state championship," he said. "I remember the coaches telling me that if I didn't put anything in the trophy case before I left, it wasn't a successful time."