On Friday night, Cole Lavin donned the No. 14 jersey for Brighton High School in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, nearly 700 miles from his hometown of Newport Beach, Calif., when it opened its season against Fremont High School (Plain City, Utah) in one of the first high school football games of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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In a normal world, Lavin would have been getting ready for his senior season at Newport Harbor High School right now, but the past six months have been far from normal.
On July 20, the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) made the decision to push the start of its 2020-2021 football season to January. At the time, it was clear the decision would carry ripple effects for the college football recruiting trail. In the weeks since, Lavin has become one of at least four quarterbacks from the Southern California area who have moved out of state to play high school football this fall. That group is headlined by four-star signal caller Jake Garcia, a USC commit who enrolled at Valdosta High School in south Georgia last week. The others who have made a move are Titus Tucker, who transferred from Hart (Santa Clarita, Calif.) to play football in Alabama, and Ethan Grady, who left Santa Monica Catholic to play for Valor Christian High School in Colorado.
“We were really just kind of weighing the pros and cons of it,” said Lavin, whose sophomore and junior seasons were cut short by injury. “If I come out here, I’m almost guaranteeing myself a season. If I stay there, who knows what’s going to happen. We have no control over it. Ultimately, I just didn’t want to leave my senior year up to the possibility of me not playing at all.”
Garcia is the highest-profile relocation by far, and his possession of numerous Power 5 scholarship offers separates his case from the less heralded players uprooting their lives in search of a fall football season that could put their tape in front of more college evaluators. But the lack of a mass exodus (at least so far) from states that have pushed back their high school seasons to states that are playing on illustrates the difficulty — and maybe the risk — of following through with that decision.
Garcia, who was supposed to play for La Habra High School (Calif.) this season before moving to Georgia, didn’t exactly need to play football this fall. He’s the No. 37 overall player in the country, on the cusp of five-star status, and the No. 4 pro-style QB prospect in the class of 2021 according to the 247Sports Composite.
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Garcia’s status among the nation’s elite prospects is secure whether he plays this fall or not. But he and his father have followed the developments surrounding COVID-19 closely. When La Habra shut down workouts earlier this summer after a freshman football player’s family member tested positive for COVID-19, Randy Garcia figured the CIF would probably push his son’s senior football season to the winter.
“I knew Jake wanted to play,” Randy said. “So we were kind of looking around and seeing which states were going to stay open. So it’s been in the back of our mind for a while.”
Even though Garcia’s blue-chip status is secure, he wants more game reps before he gets to college. He has never played a full high school season. As a freshman at Long Beach Poly (Calif.), he sat behind current Ole Miss quarterback Matt Corral. He transferred to Narbonne High School (Harbor City, Calif.) as a sophomore but had to sit the first five games because of CIF transfer rules. Last November, Garcia’s junior season was cut short when Narbonne was banned from the 2019 and 2020 playoffs for rules violations. So he transferred to La Habra, only to watch the first games of the season be pushed back to January, the month he plans on enrolling at USC.
Garcia brought up moving out of state to his father, who says the mere thought of it stressed him out. If they had to go somewhere, Randy hoped it would be somewhere close, like to a school in Arizona or maybe to powerhouse Bishop Gorman in Nevada. When the CIF made its decision, Randy began to take things seriously.
“I have to give credit to his mom, my wife,” Randy said. “Because she said several times, ‘He needs to play. He needs to play at a big-time program.’ ”
Jake Garcia has always been intrigued by the South. Even though he remains committed to the Trojans, Miami is still making a heavy push to land him. Valdosta, which is 2,300 miles from home in Whittier, Calif., suddenly became an option.
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He discussed the move with USC’s coaches, who OK’d the decision and wanted him to get the reps, according to a source within the program. So nine days ago, Garcia and his father, a retired law enforcement officer and former Nebraska quarterback, moved to Valdosta.
“I was a little surprised,” said Valdosta coach Rush Propst, a longtime coach in Alabama and Georgia best known for his time at Hoover High School (Ala.), which was chronicled on the mid-2000s MTV show “Two-A-Days”. “He did his research, I think, on everything. With me, the team and the type of football we play down here. In his mind, if California’s going to do what they’re doing, which I don’t agree with, I applaud him. I applaud his parents for making the move. That’s a long way.”
Garcia will compete with another transfer quarterback, Amari Jones, and last year’s backup, Mike Miller, for Valdosta’s starting job. The trio was still splitting reps as of last week.
“(Garcia’s) got all the tools you want,” Propst said. “We’re just trying to teach him the things you need to do on the next level.”
The Georgia High School Association has set a Sept. 4 start date for the upcoming season, though some counties have postponed fall sports to a later date.
Georgia, which has roughly a quarter of the population of California, has struggled mightily with COVID-19 in its own right and on Monday morning sat tied with Florida as the state with the most cases per 100,000 residents in the last seven days, according to the New York Times’ coronavirus tracker. Although a large chunk of Georgia’s total cases traces back to Atlanta and the densely populated surrounding counties, Lowndes County, where Valdosta is located, has reported a higher rate of cases per 100,000 residents in the past two weeks than either Los Angeles County or Orange County.
Garcia’s grandfather, who was 93 and had underlying health conditions, died earlier this summer after contracting COVID-19. But potential health concerns haven’t caused the family any hesitation about the move.
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“It’s always in the back of your mind because they bring it up,” Randy said. “I’m not concerned about it enough to restrict Jake from doing what he wants to do. I’m not going to do that to him. He’s old enough to make his own decisions also.”
Last week the Pac-12, the conference Garcia is slated to play in next year, and the Big Ten decided to cancel the 2020 fall football season with hopes of playing in the spring. Though the Pac-12 and Big Ten decided it was unsafe to play, the SEC seems steadfast with its intentions to play this fall — for the moment, at least — and Garcia has placed himself in the heart of that league’s footprint.
“The South, the Big 12 decided to play, the SEC has decided,” Propst said. “The ACC has decided. High school football in Georgia and Alabama has decided. I just think we’re on a different side of the coin than y’all (California) on the deal.”
Propst said the Valdosta football program had four positive COVID-19 tests this summer, including a coach who tested positive. He said the program checks temperatures twice a day, asks its players questions and sanitizes “like crazy.”
“I think we need football right now more than we ever needed football. I am sensitive to the fact with this virus,” Propst said. “I understand it’s there. I know that it’s killing people. I get that. Our kids, we can go on and have football and keep them safe because we’re taking a lot of precautions.”
Last week, GHSA executive director Robin Hines said the season’s Sept. 4 start date could change based on COVID-19 data. Nearly 70 GHSA schools won’t kick off their season on time because of the pandemic, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Like Garcia, Lavin has yet to play a full season of high school football. Injuries ended his sophomore and junior seasons at Newport Harbor prematurely. His goal is to play college football somewhere, and the CIF’s decision to push football back to the winter presents a significant hurdle.
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“He doesn’t really have much to show,” Lavin’s father Jason said. “And there’s no way of getting any exposure that I can see.”
The Lavins had discussed the possibility of moving out of state to play football over dinner, and even though it seemed far-fetched initially — Cole liked it at Newport Harbor, and Jason was the football program’s booster club president last year — it became real when the CIF made its decision.
“I’ve written many letters to the district,” Jason said. “Can we get a plan? What do the numbers need to look like? Instead of suspending, pushing things back, let’s try to get some quantitative numbers on how they’ll make a decision. And frankly, I don’t see it. I have very little confidence they have a plan and that’s OK, but instead of complaining about it, we thought we should look somewhere else.”
The Lavins pulled up the MaxPreps database and looked at states that were playing football and those that weren’t. They considered Texas, which pushed back the first games for its two largest classifications to Sept. 24-26 and for its four others to Aug. 27-29. Texas would have been preferable because there was more lead time and better football, but Jason had family in Utah, and the company he started, GoldenComm, has an office in Salt Lake City, so that became the natural choice. They looked at three schools and settled on Brighton.
Utah was the first state to play any sort of high school football this year. The state held its first game of the season on Thursday night between Herriman and Davis in a stadium that was limited to 25 percent capacity. Everyone was required to wear masks.
Herriman High takes the field for the first regular season high school football game in the country since the pandemic. #Football #tribpreps
— Alex Vejar (@AlexVReporting) August 14, 2020
“My senior year is my last shot of being noticed,” Lavin said. “If that didn’t happen, obviously, football probably wouldn’t happen for me in college. So this was my last shot at it. It was definitely more motivation for me to come out here.”
Danny Hernandez, a private quarterback coach based in Southern California who works with Garcia and multiple other college-bound QBs, doesn’t work with Lavin but understands the dilemma he’s facing. Hernandez estimates six of his pupils approached him about moving out of state to play this fall after the CIF pushed its season back.
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“The majority of them were seniors, and that’s where that pressure comes from,” Hernandez said. “Because some of these guys were on that bubble and feel like, ‘I have to get this season in to put me a little bit more on the radar.’ Sometimes the grading they got from these college coaches was they really liked them but they needed to see two or three games of film from their senior year. So you kind of go into panic mode, thinking, ‘Am I going to have the film that I need to close the deal on these schools?’ ”
Hernandez dealt with those players on a case-by-case basis. He was fine with Garcia moving to Georgia to play. Others have remained in Southern California, like Walker Eget, a three-star prospect who has some offers from Group of 5 schools but could have used this year’s spring and fall evaluation periods to generate exposure and add to his current list.
So Hernandez has had to get creative, working his relationships with college coaches to see where his quarterbacks fit on their boards and relay information. He’ll go through scripts with his quarterbacks and mic them up; the recordings allow college coaches a closer look at a player’s command and communication skills without any additional game action to study.
Lavin came to Utah looking for exposure, but his path may not be any easier at his new school. Brighton returned its starting quarterback from a year ago, Gabe Curtis, who passed for 2,401 yards, 20 touchdowns and seven interceptions as a junior.
In Brighton’s 56-42 triumph over Fremont on Friday, Curtis accounted for six touchdowns — four passing and two rushing. Starts at quarterback are far from guaranteed for Lavin, who has been at Brighton for just a few weeks now.
Still, he has what he was definitely going to miss in California: a chance to play. Lavin doesn’t seem too worried about potential health risks that come with playing a high-contact sport during a pandemic, and neither does his father.
Although Utah got to the starting line and has begun play, the season still seems like a week-to-week proposition at best. One of the first games of the season, Weber vs. Bingham, was canceled after three Bingham players tested positive for COVID-19. The season began the same week that two of the state’s three FBS programs, Utah and Utah State, had their fall seasons canceled.
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“We just made a chart, weighed out the options and the decision was clear,” Jason Lavin said. “(Cole) wants to be in a place, he’s playing the odds. This could cancel, too. This whole thing could completely implode on us. But he felt his best opportunity to have a football season was not in California.”
“There’s still that uncertainty of these kids leaving,” Hernandez said. “They could end up leaving and you’re in a whole new place and then they decide, ‘Hey guys, we’re deciding to push things back, too.’ Now it’s like, ‘OK, I moved all the way over here and out of my routine for what?’
“It’s a big gamble either way, whether you stay or you go. It’s a gamble.”
Dr. Annabelle De St. Maurice is an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases and leads the Pediatric Infection Control and Antibiotic Stewardship Programs at UCLA. She’s been focused on COVID-19 since January. She also was an advisor on the Pac-12 COVID-19 medical advisory committee. The uncertainties that come with the pandemic gave her reservations about the college football season, and the thought process is similar when it comes to attempting to play high school football anywhere that doesn’t have COVID-19 completely under control.
“I don’t think it is a good idea,” De St. Maurice said. “I think if you’re having widespread community transmission within your state or county or community I think it doesn’t make sense to have a contact sport. I realize that’s an unpopular sentiment, but we’re in a situation where a lot of counties aren’t allowing children to go back to school because the rates of transmission are so high. To then add additional risk by allowing sports to happen, I think, makes it more difficult to allow children to go back to school in general.”
Miller Moss is a four-star quarterback who is committed to USC’s 2021 recruiting class alongside Garcia. He’s the No. 6 overall player in the state of California in the 2021 cycle. He hasn’t moved out of state to save his fall season, but that doesn’t mean he and his family haven’t thought about it.
Emily Kovner-Moss, Miller’s mother, said the Mosses had expected the CIF’s ruling for a long time. They’ve been contemplating their options since April. The goal was to put Moss in a position where he could be nimble. He completed all his NCAA requirements so that if he transferred out of state, he could do so easily.
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“We thought about a lot of different things, and our thinking is continuing but in retrospect it’s largely speculation,” Kovner-Moss said. “We thought if we were going to move, playing in Hawaii would’ve been the safest bet because they have effectively dealt with COVID in a way many other places in the country haven’t, but Hawaii just changed their season to January. Again, that’s probably the right move, but making evidence-based decisions wouldn’t have helped us in that case. Because it does seem like the decision to play or not for high school is often divorced from science.
“Places that are going to play aren’t necessarily the places that have managed the pandemic better than others. That’s why decision making on where to play high school is so challenging.”
Moss intends to enroll at USC in January, so he only has a few more months left of high school. Kovner-Moss didn’t want to say they’ve 100 percent ruled out moving out of state, but right now they’re trying to figure out what Moss needs to do with his body and his game in order to grow during this final semester before he joins the Trojans.
She was hoping there would be some sort of national protocol that would give states guidance, with a framework based on metrics that could have helped decide where it was and wasn’t safe to play.
But that isn’t happening, so she and her son routinely reassess the situation, with his chances of playing football this fall decreasing by the day.
“With everything changing it’s so hard to make well-informed decisions,” Kovner-Moss said. “Every day we try to regroup, recalibrate and try to pivot to the positive. At this point, what we’re trying to do is how do you make this semester really worthwhile? How do you find the opportunity and capitalize on it? So that’s our strategy going forward.”
(Top photo of Jake Garcia courtesy of Steven Barron)
