How Miami RB commit Donald Chaney Jr. earned the hype and then lived up to it at Belen
Don Chaney Sr. had to have the conversations about his son’s future earlier than he could have ever possibly expected.
Donald Chaney Jr. was only in eighth grade when the Syracuse Orange reached out to offer him a scholarship, so father and son started to talk about why he had to take football seriously and what he could get out of his gifts.
He had played a handful of games with Belen Jesuit’s varsity team in the fall and college coaches saw what his father and anyone who happened to stop by Harris Field Park to watch one of his Homestead Youth League games had already seen.
“I saw signs,” Chaney Sr. said. “He was explosive.”
His first touch for the Wolverines was a 30-yard carry. He started a playoff game against Southridge, which won the 2016 Class 8A championship a year later. The four games that he played for Belen Jesuit were enough for not just Syracuse to get interested, but the Miami Hurricanes, too, and he spent the next four years as their biggest recruiting target for the Class of 2020.
On Wednesday, Miami’s pursuit of the four-star running back will officially end. Chaney, who orally committed in February, will sign his National Letter of Intent with the Hurricanes at 10 a.m. at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in west Miami-Dade County on the first day of the early signing period.
So far, he’s the crown jewel of the Hurricanes’ class, which currently ranks No. 15 in the 247Sports.com composite rankings. Despite Miami’s struggles to keep South Florida talent home, Chaney’s commitment means the top-ranked player in Miami-Dade will suit up for the Hurricanes.
All these years later, Chaney, the No. 35 overall player in the nation, has lived up to the lofty expectations that he, and Syracuse and all the other teams that offered him before he began high school, established for himself.
“I think the biggest thing for him that sets him apart,” said Eddie Delgado, who was the Wolverines’ coach from 2016 until this fall, “as talented as he is, he was our hardest worker.”
Those early highlights that first drew coaches’ attention in 2015, however, don’t look so far off from the ones that he produced on a weekly basis as a senior this season.
He was already close to his current 5-foot-11 frame, and he had competed in track and field since he was in sixth grade, so he ran with a sprinter’s stride. He didn’t have to knock over defenders or juke his way through defenses — he found his blockers, he made one cut, and he exploded through the hole at close to his top speed.
The biggest difference now is he has filled out. Chaney weighed in at 203 pounds at The Opening in June, and he hasn’t sacrificed explosiveness for bulk.
The halfback became Belen Jesuit’s all-time leading rusher this year, running for 1,279 yards and 15 touchdowns on only 114 carries in 2019. He was always a mature runner and a fast runner. Now, he’s a complete runner.
Chaney Jr. was probably just 4 or 5 the day he stumbled upon a photograph of his father in the garage from his playing days. Chaney Sr. was a 6-4, 235-pound wide receiver for the South Carolina Gamecocks in the 1990s after starring at Homestead and spending some time at a junior college. He briefly got some looks in the NFL.
By the time he saw the photo, Chaney Jr. was already football-obsessed. Chaney Sr. was coaching youth teams and Chaney Jr. would tag along to watch. He would thrust himself into the action by working as a water boy, running on to the field during stoppages to help out the players. The photograph, however, made Chaney Jr. think bigger.
“’I was like, ‘Dad, when is that?’ He’s like, ‘That’s in college,’ and I’m like, ‘You’re so big!’ ” Chaney Jr. said. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s what happens when you get into a college.’
“I’m like, ‘I can’t wait to do that.’”
He was a superstar in his youth leagues and then a superstar in middle school. Delgado watched Chaney Jr. play against his son’s team when the tailback was 10 and he remembers Chaney Jr. scoring every time he touched the ball. It was the same when he played for Belen Jesuit’s middle-school team and similar when he played on junior varsity as an eighth-grader before he got called up to varsity. Even on varsity, Chaney Jr. was explosive enough to go untouched on long touchdown runs, including a called-back-for-holding 99-yard score against Southwest in 2017.
He also would be the favorite to win a state title in the high jump for the fourth straight year if he weren’t early enrolling at Miami. His two-sport success made him the Herald’s 9A-6A Male Athlete of the Year for Dade each of the past two years.
Chaney Jr. was in sixth grade the first time he tried the high jump, essentially on a whim. He ran the 3,200-meter relay earlier in the day for Arvida Middle School and his coach just wanted to find someone who could compete in the high jump to get Arvida a few more points. Chaney Sr. urged his son to give it a shot.
“I don’t know how to do it,” Chaney Jr. protested, so his father pulled up a two-minute YouTube video explaining the basics of the event. A few minutes later, Chaney Jr. mimicked the form displayed in the video and cleared 5 feet 6 inches to win.
“His form was actually like perfect,” Chaney Sr. said. “I said, ‘Dang, you went over that thing high!’ ”
As a junior, Chaney Jr.’s top mark was 6-8 3/4.
“I think that’s the thing; talk to all these different coaches that come in and talking about what they like about him the most, it’s just that explosiveness that he has and I think it translates so much when he does high jump. You don’t typically see a high jumper that is his size and definitely not his weight,” Delgado said. “To imagine that he’s at 200 pounds and he’s getting his hips over seven feet, the amount of explosiveness that he has is extraordinary.”
One day, it could be enough to get him into the NFL.
For now, it isn’t anything that Chaney Jr. thinks about. His focus is what will come first when he arrives in Coral Gables next month. He’ll join a loaded running-backs room, which will include incoming Deerfield Beach four-star running back Jaylan Knighton, and try to compete. Once again, he has lofty expectations to meet.
“We’ve never had an NFL conversation, and we never will until that point comes,” Chaney Sr. said, “so it was all about academics and getting into a good school where he can become something in life.”
This story was originally published December 17, 2019 at 5:01 PM.
