Year of the running back
After a look at USC's past, David Kirtman knew what he wanted for his future.
As a junior at Mercer Island, he walked through Heritage Hall and peered into the display cases celebrating the school's four Heisman Trophy winners, all running backs. Of the 121 All-Americans honored with a plaque, 21 were running backs.
The legacy was impressive enough that Kirtman decided to become a Trojan if he had the chance.
"It's like the best place to go if you're a running back," he said.
Kirtman accepted USC's scholarship offer last May, the first of this year's area recruits to choose a school. Fitting that it was Tailback U. This year, running backs are at the head of the recruiting class in Washington.
That's a change for Washington, which has a reputation for linemen and quarterbacks. There have been nationally prominent running backs before such as Paul Arnold, but never a group like this.
Colleges usually shop for speed in the southern latitudes, states like California, Texas and Florida. The apple state is known as a bulk-food aisle for linemen as well as top-shelf quarterbacks.
Those stereotypes don't apply to Kirtman and four other backs who have run into the national recruiting sweepstakes with the strides of thoroughbreds. Each weighs more than 200 pounds, all run 40 yards in less than 4.5 seconds and together they compose Washington's most heralded group of high-school running backs in the past 20 years and perhaps in state history.
"It's rare to have them all be that size," said Greg Biggins of StudentSports, which runs the Nike summer combine in Eugene, Ore. "All five of those guys are studs."
In the past three decades, only one running back from Washington has carried the ball for USC. Next season, there could be two. In addition to Kirtman, Cory Jones of Kennedy said the Trojans have offered him a scholarship. The other three have big-college options of their own and could end up in the Pac-10.
Ty Eriks of O'Dea includes three schools from the conference among the nine he is considering, and John Gardenhire of Kentwood and Dan McCourtie of Othello have been offered scholarships by Washington.
SuperPrep named Eriks and Jones preseason All-Americans, and the other three were rated among the top 15 prospects in the state. Four are currently ranked among the nation's top 100 high-school rushers by Rivals100.com.
"Usually you have one or two guys," said Jeremy Crabtree of Rivals100.com. "But here you have five who could be playing anywhere in the Pac-10 or anywhere in the country."
They know the others' names, but are only marginally aware of the statistics and reputations. They play in different leagues and ponder their own choice of colleges instead of wondering where the others will end up.
"You just don't think about that much," Eriks said.
They don't talk about it, either. Gardenhire met Eriks at Washington last spring when more than 50 players were invited to campus. The conversation kept clear of the game that links them.
"You kind of stay away from football," Gardenhire said. "Being a top prospect, they just want to get it off their mind sometimes. You talk to them on a friends aspect."
The competition is unspoken. Even if they're not focusing on each other, there is always peripheral vision. Kirtman said he looked at recruiting Web sites and read the evaluations. Nothing neurotic. Just checking up.
"I've just kind of educated myself," he said.
McCourtie got a first-hand lesson. He stood on the sideline and watched Eriks at a camp in Idaho this summer. McCourtie knew exactly who Eriks was, but they never met at the camp.
"I'm sure he would have liked to have gone up against him," Othello Coach Roger Hoell said. "They're both the same type of kids. Their teams run the option, both feature the fullback and both are real big kids who don't back down."
McCourtie is 6-feet-3, weighs 230 pounds, the biggest of the five backs though he plays at the smallest school. Othello is 40 miles from Moses Lake, about 50 miles from the Tri-Cities and 73 miles from Ellensburg, putting McCourtie in a gridiron Bermuda Triangle.
But McCourtie's roots are deep in this small town, which runs through the family tree just like size. His father and uncle are both 6-4 and live in Othello. At birth, Dan weighed 9 pounds, 10 ounces, "the orneriest kid in town," according to his father. He started lifting weights in fifth grade, and not only is he Othello's fastest player, he's also its strongest.
The other four aren't far behind McCourtie in size. All five have what college coaches search for in running backs, muscled bodies in the mold of Eddie George and Terrell Davis.
"That's the new trend in college football," Crabtree said. "It's trickling down to the high-school level, where instead of 5-10, 180-pound backs you're finding guys who 6 foot, 200 pounds and have speed."
At 5-11 1/2, Gardenhire is the only one of the five shorter than 6 feet, but small is an adjective that has never applied to him. In junior high, he wondered if he would grow out of being a running back. He looked up the family tree and saw his dad, John Gardenhire Sr., who was a lineman at the University of Washington beginning in 1977. He wondered if that was his future.
"I thought I might get too big," he said.
He's just right, enough pounds to pack a punch and the speed of a sprint star. That makes him a perfect fit with this group, which has a running start on the season.
Their names are already well known, their reputations established as the most coveted quintet of running backs this state has seen in at least a generation.
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Dan McCourtie
Othello
Height: 6 feet 3
Weight: 230 pounds
40 speed: 4.46 seconds
Bench-press: 385 pounds max, 28 repetitions at 185 pounds
Colleges: Washington, Arizona State, Oregon, BYU and Nebraska.
Dan McCourtie was on track to join the lineman lineage at Class 2A Othello High School.
He was 6-2, 215 pounds as a sophomore and it was only natural for Coach Roger Hoell to play him at guard for a team that graduated three Division I-A linemen in the past two years.
"At a school our size, you stick him on the line," Hoell said.
But when the starting fullback went down with an injury in the fourth game of the season, McCourtie moved to the backfield. He scored the first time he carried the ball in that game, an 80-yard rumble through the middle of the Omak defense.
"He just ran a kid over," Hoell said. "The guy tried to bring him down and it wasn't even close."
McCourtie finished with 1,344 yards rushing as a sophomore and received his first recruiting letter after the season. It came from Texas, and arrived about the time Ricky Williams was finishing his run to the Heisman Trophy, and any question that McCourtie's future was in the backfield and not on the line was already answered.
In 21 games, McCourtie has rushed for 2,527 yards and scored 27 touchdowns. Those numbers come against Class 2A competition, but this season Othello plays Prosser, the defending Class 3A champ, in the fifth game of the season. It's the kind of test Hoell is sure his running back will pass.
"I don't care what level he played at, he would always excel," Hoell said. "He's a man; the guy is absolutely a man."
McCourtie is the third biggest player on Othello's team, but also the strongest and fastest. He broke his father's school record in the discus last year with a throw of 185 feet, best in the state. Dan's uncle played football at Washington State where he was a lineman.
But McCourtie isn't following the family footsteps toward Pullman. The Huskies are high on his list and have already offered a scholarship. He also is very interested in Arizona State. BYU is another option, which is where Othello graduate Eddie Keele attends. Keele was a lineman. So was McCourtie until a fateful 80-yard rumble convinced the coaches otherwise.
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John Gardenhire
Kentwood
Height: 5-11 1/2
Weight: 205
40 speed: 4.4 seconds
Bench-press: 240 pounds max
Colleges: No list of final choices though he said he would like to play in the Pac-10. Washington and Washington State have offered scholarships, but he will wait to decide. "I have no favorites or anything. I'm keeping all my options open," he said.
When his seventh-grade coach asked what position he played, John Gardenhire said running back.
It was the truth, just not the whole truth.
"I hadn't really played that much," Gardenhire said.
No one noticed. Gardenhire scored four touchdowns his first game. He finished with 28 in seven games, erasing a bad experience in a Pop Warner league where he was overlooked by his coaches.
"At one point, I wanted to quit," Gardenhire said. "But my dad would take me into the backyard and just work me like a dog."
His father, John Gardenhire Sr., was a Washington lineman who graduated from Seattle's Nathan Hale in 1977. Dad squatted more than 600 pounds in high school and lettered two seasons for the Huskies. He loved the contact involved with playing on the line and for 13 years has played nose guard in the Bacon Bowl for the Seattle Police Department.
He wasn't sure his son enjoyed the physical aspects of football until he watched John Jr. rush for 870 yards as a sophomore at Kentwood.
"He impressed a lot of people, including me," John Sr. said.
Shiftiness has been John Jr.'s signature style. Of the top five backs this season, he is the the most elusive, a darter who makes defenders miss.
But don't overlook his toughness. In last year's Class 4A state title game, he gained a game-high 141 yards despite playing on an ankle that was sprained so badly his foot was taped twice. The first layer was under his sock, the second over it.
"It was like running with a cast," he said.
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Cory Jones
Kennedy High School
Height: 6-2
Weight: 210 pounds
40 speed: 4.4 seconds
Bench-press: 335 pounds max
Colleges: Washington, Georgia Tech, Notre Dame, USC and Nebraska
Football was the last sport Cory Jones tried.
First came baseball, then came basketball and finally in junior high, he tried football, the sport his father played in college and then in Canada.
"I never really trained with him that much in football," said Andre Jones, a defensive back at UNLV who played eight years in the Canadian Football League.
Cory was 13 in his first game, playing defensive end for the Burien Bearcats. He showed early flashes of tailback instincts when he picked up a fumble and returned it for a touchdown. Five years later, his running skills have earned scholarship offers from Notre Dame, Oregon State, Georgia Tech and USC, though he has started only four games at tailback.
When Jones transfered from Class 2A Foster to Kennedy last year, he told coaches he was a wide receiver. That's where he started the season-opener against Ellensburg, but switched to running back when starter David Roline was injured. Jones finished the season with 712 yards rushing and nine touchdowns despite being slowed by a high ankle sprain for the last half of the season.
Jones' hands are good enough that some schools say he could play receiver in college. But most are recruiting him as a tailback, a 210-pound bruiser who doesn't shy away from contact. In fact, his father tells him he needs to work on making people miss.
"Sometimes I think he would rather run a guy over than juke him," Andre said.
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Ty Eriks
O'Dea
Height: 6-2
Weight: 220 pounds
40 speed: 4.39 seconds
Bench-press: 290 pounds
Colleges: Washington, Stanford, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Michigan, Miami, UCLA, USC, Florida State, Ohio State.
The first letter arrived his sophomore year, beginning a drizzle that became a postal downpour.
Eriks receives an average of about 10 recruiting letters a day, giving him enough to fill six boxes, and his senior season hasn't even started. His favorites are affixed to the wall of his bedroom, compliments from coaches and scholarship offers that blend together in a colorful collage of college letterhead.
"It's kind of like wallpaper," Eriks said.
He has run out of room on the walls, and the mural has spread to the ceiling. Most are hand-written, personalized touches that let Eriks know just how important he is as a recruit.
He is the highest-rated running back in the state, according to Rivals100.com, which ranks him No. 48 running back in the country.
He is 6 2, 220 pounds, and the fastest of the state's Fab Five running backs. That's in part because of training he did with a running coach, who also worked with Teyo Johnson and Amon Gordon, former students at Mariner High School who will attend Stanford this fall.
Like Gordon and Johnson, Eriks isn't in a hurry to commit to any school. He wants to visit the schools he is considering before making a decision.
Washington's offer came first. Others have followed and the offers have earned an appropriate place on his bedroom wall.
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David Kirtman
Mercer Island
Height: 6-1
Weight: 207 pounds
40 speed: 4.5 seconds
Bench press: 30 repetitions of 185 pounds
College: Committed to USC last May. "I was really excited when I heard because that's the place I really wanted to go."
David Kirtman had the same deal with his parents as his brother and sister. Once he was 14, he could stop taking piano lessons if he wanted to.
His older siblings stopped. He didn't. His mom wouldn't let him.
"I know he enjoys it because when he sits down, he starts singing when he's playing," said Ann Kirtman, David's mother. "So I did push him, because I knew he had the talent."
That's the softer side of a muscle-bound back whose biceps are the size of a grapefruit. He was so developed in grade school that other parents asked his mother if he lifted weights. Nope. Never touched them until high school, and then he put on 30 pounds in one year.
He played varsity football as a freshman, started as a sophomore and last season set a school record with 1,311 yards rushing.
"He's always been a very hard runner," Mercer Island Coach Dick Nicholl said.
Older brother Mike had straightaway speed and he plays wide receiver at Pomona. But David always had size to go with speed. As a junior, David reached the state track meet in the shot put and in the 100 meters, a combination reminiscent of Paul Arnold, who won the Class 3A state title in the 100 and 200 meters in 1998 and also competed in the shot put.
For two years, Kirtman has been the strongest player on the Mercer Island team. On the first day of practice, the team had weight tests. David squatted 455 pounds 11 times, maybe 12.
"We kind of lost track," Kirtman said.
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BEST OF THE REST
Some other top running backs from the state:
Eric Bailey, 5-11, 180, Bellarmine Prep
Gained 1,200 yards as a sophomore, 1,500 as a junior and attended UCLA camp
Eric Kimble, 5-11, 185, Franklin Pierce
Won two league rushing titles and piled up more than 2,000 all-purpose yards
Michael Ray Richardson, 6-0, 190, Richland
Gained 1,654 yards on 292 carries as a junior for state-champion Bombers
Joe Rubin, 5-11, 240, Foss
Rushed for 1,200-plus yards on 2-7 team in '99; benches more than 400 pounds