‘It happened so fast’: How the recruitment of two Gibbons stars finally took off in 2021
Somewhere on Cardinal Gibbons’ tour through the Southeastern United States last summer, Ahmad Moten decided he’d had enough.
The exact location doesn’t really matter because it happened every time: The Chiefs, as a team, would go on a college visit and get the broad strokes of a standard college tour, and then whatever coaches were around would pluck aside R Mason Thomas, Tray Brown and Isaiah Farris — the team’s three most obvious Division I prospects — to give them the individualized attention they felt they deserved.
Moten, almost 300 pounds and ignored, let it eat at him. He knew he was running out of time to change the way people saw him.
“I’m with the other guys and I’m like, I’m not going out like that. There’s no way you’re telling me that they’re better than me,” the defensive tackle said. “Not being cocky — they’re my teammates — but I’ve got to be one of those guys.”
He had seen firsthand how things had gone for Thomas, who was a running back as recently as the start of his sophomore year before he abruptly turned into one of Broward County’s best edge rushers as a junior.
If it could happen for Thomas, then why not him?
Less than a year later, the defensive linemen’s recruitments are still deeply intertwined and they’ll make Fort Lauderdale one of the centers of the recruiting world Wednesday when they make their final decisions at 1:30 p.m. on National Signing Day at Cardinal Gibbons High School.
Thomas, who’s still orally committed to the Iowa State Cyclones, and Moten have been two of the fastest-rising prospects in the country in the last few months and the Miami Hurricanes are right in the thick of it all.
Thomas landed an offer from Miami on Christmas and took an official visit to Coral Gables over the weekend. Moten, whose older brother played for the Hurricanes in the 2010s, picked up his offer from Miami a few days after Thanksgiving and spent the weekend on campus for an official visit, too.
The Oklahoma Sooners are recruiting both of them and they each took an official visit to Oklahoma last month. Iowa State wants to get Moten to come and team up with Thomas, so the Cyclones brought him to Iowa for an official right after the end of the regular season. Moten also took official visits with the North Carolina Tar Heels and Tennessee Volunteers last month, and Thomas has gone to check out the Kentucky Wildcats and South Carolina Gamecocks.
In the last four months, they’ve combined to reel in 27 scholarship offers with Moten going from none at the start of his senior season to 24 now.
“What happened?” Moten said and it was an honest question. He thought through his answer for a few seconds. “It happened so fast. I was just playing football.”
Really, it wasn’t quite so simple. The football was the easy part — the reward — at the end of a grueling, transformational summer for Moten to make sure he wasn’t wasting his potential.
From unknown to All-County
Those college trips in the first few weeks of the summer left Moten exactly where he began: unwanted. Moten was a part-time player as a junior, backing up first-team All-County defensive lineman Jertavis Black, and had only 17 tackles and three tackles for loss, with no sacks, in eight games.
He was the most valuable player at one of the FIU Panthers’ camps, but it wasn’t enough for FIU to offer him a scholarship. He got his massive frame in front of college coaches all over the Southeast, but it only turned them off.
“I didn’t want to be one of those kids who had the size, who could’ve did this, but ain’t do nothing with it,” Moten said. “I made sure I was on the right track.”
Throughout his childhood, lofty expectations chased Moten and not just because he was growing into a 6-foot-3, 290-pound behemoth.
Anthony Moten, his older brother, was a star at St. Thomas Aquinas, and went on to play for the Hurricanes and Miami Dolphins. Moten had a legacy to live up to.
A 300-pound frame is delicate, though, and Moten was the wrong kind of 300 pounds for his first three years of high school — “sloppy,” he said. When he got back from his first round of college visits, Moten had six weeks until his senior season began and he decided he was going to use every moment of them to become the type of player college coaches wanted.
“He came up to me and he just basically said, Coach, I want you to push me harder than you’ve ever pushed me. I want you to stay on me,” said Zack Rehman, who owns Tuff Training in Margate and runs workouts for Cardinal Gibbons three times a week in the offseason. “I did.”
Moten had a seven-day regimen he stuck to for six straight weeks. He trained with Rehman on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with workouts including three-mile runs and pushing 25-passenger vans. On Saturdays, he ran hills, then did defensive line drills every Sunday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he worked out by himself at a gym near his house, putting in eight-hour days, he said, and then playing four hours of basketball on top of it, rather than going home to play video games.
He cut out the McDonald’s, and replaced it with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He stopped going out with friends every night to make sure he’d never skip a day of workouts. It all paid off: Iowa State offered him about six weeks into his senior season and then he got eight offers in four days.
Less than six months ago, he was almost entirely unknown. Now, after earning first-team All-Broward honors from the Miami Herald with six tackles for loss and three sacks as a senior, he’s one of the 600 best prospects in the country, according to the 247Sports.com composite rankings.
“The maturation process happened for him,” coach Matt DuBuc said. “He really put himself on the map.”
Thomas’ unlikely blue-chip bump
Thomas saw it all happen from a few inches to the left and it couldn’t help but feel familiar.
The edge rusher landed his first scholarship offer almost exactly a year to the day before Moten got his first.
Now, Thomas is a top-500 prospect, and 247Sports recently gave him a bump to four-star status after he went off for 19 tackles for loss 12 sacks as a senior. Back then, he was only about a year removed from playing running back and had no sense he was about to become a two-time first-team all-county selection.
“I really surprised myself,” Thomas said.
He swelled from 5-10 and 155 pounds as a freshman to 6-1, 185 as a sophomore and Cardinal Gibbons finally decided to move him from running back to defensive end after about two games. Now he’s 6-2, 215, one of the best players in Florida and “not even scratching the surface on how good he’s going to be,” DuBuc said.
The coach envisions a near future where Thomas is 240-plus pounds. Rehman expects him to move to linebacker and become one of the best in the country
“Thomas, to me, is our best NFL prospect — at this time, at this point — that we’ve ever had,” DuBuc said.
There’s a chance some team — perhaps the Hurricanes — will get both he and Moten, although Moten said they’re not committed to playing together at the next level.
There are seldom secrets in recruiting anymore, yet these two come close. They came into their senior years overlooked. Now they’re impossible to ignore.
“It’s satisfying to see when a young person can basically seize their opportunity in their own hands,” Rehman said, “and make it work for him.”
This story was originally published February 1, 2022 at 10:58 AM.
