If you've ever attended a Hialeah football game and scanned the crowd, it would be easy to spot Henry and Francoise Lemonier. They are the ones asking all the questions and following their son's every move.

While both had grown up watching soccer in Haiti, these days American football has taken center stage. Their son, Corey, just happens to be one of the best defensive end prospects in the country -- less than two years after he started playing the game.

At 6-4, 230-pounds, Lemonier has risen to heights that many longtime football players never get to, and this spring, while college coaches have made their annual stop in South Florida, Hialeah is certainly one of the places they seems to flock to daily.

A basketball player much of his young life, Lemonier was often persuaded to come out and give football a try. At the end of his ninth-grader year, when Marc Berman arrived at the school as head coach, he gave in and came out for a sport that he had watched and loved, but never played before.

''Basketball was pretty much everything to me,'' Lemonier said. ``I had always watched football on TV, but I just never got the urge to go and play for a team.''

His first official game came two years ago in a spring contest against Homestead. It was in that game that college coaches, on hand to see prospects Corey Luiget of Hialeah and Marcus Robinson (Homestead), saw a tall, thin kid who was raw, but showed tremendous quickness.

During the coming months, Lemonier worked hard, went to camps and put himself in a position where he was looked at as a future prospect.

''We saw him at that Homestead game, wrote down his name, took a few photos and sent the information to colleges across the country,'' recalled Charles Fishbein of Elitescoutingservices.com. ``You could just tell from the first time he lined up that he had plenty of athletic ability and quickness.''

HIS FIRST GAME

While Lemonier never considered himself a future prospect, that all changed in the opening game of his sophomore season against Dr. Krop at Curtis Park. After the first play when quarterback Victor Marc went 80 yards for a touchdown, Lemonier and his teammates shut the Lightning down, drawing praise from Berman and the coaching staff.

''Having watched him play during the spring and into the summer, I knew there was something special about Corey,'' Berman said. ``By the start of his junior year, there was no doubt that he was the next great player this school was going to produce.''

While Lemonier worked in the weight room and spent extra time on the football field, college coaches were watching his every move. So were the opponents who were totally impressed at how dominant he was and how tough he was to block.

As impressive as he was on he football field, where colleges from Alabama to Tennessee, Florida, Florida State, Notre Dame, Georgia and Miami, were making a pitch to lure this gifted athlete, Lemonier was actually making more of an impression in the classroom as a student. From administrators to teachers, this was a young man who could simply do no wrong.

''The thing about Corey is he's a class individual,'' Berman said. ``Ask any teacher, student or teammate and they will all tell you that he is the total package. I don't know too many people I've been around who have had it all like he does. When I was at North Miami, Earl Little was a lot like him.''

MANY SCHOOLS IN THE MIX

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