Adam Reed: What’s So Special About This High School Football Hero? Watch Him Go Against The Big Boys

Adam Reed is a 17-year-old high school football player at American Heritage High School in Plantation, Florida, just outside of Miami. There’s nothing too special about that, even though his team is one of the Top 20-ranked high school teams nationwide by USA Today. But there is definitely something special about Adam Reed.

The youngster played as a running back on the school’s junior varsity squad through his junior year in high school. But now that he’s a senior, the rules forced him to go out for the varsity team. Either he made the team — or hang up his spikes.

But Adam made the team.

Now, that, too, might not seem all that remarkable. But watch the video of Reed practicing with his team in the video above and you’ll see why this kid is like no football player you’ve ever seen.

He’s talented, definitely. But what makes Adam Reed really incredible is that in a sport dominated by some rather large young men, Andy stands only four-feet, five-inches tall — and weighs all of 95 pounds.

Even though he hasn’t played in either of American Heritage’s first two games, Adam Reed is getting some well-deserved national attention this week, thanks to an uplifting profile piece by Miami Herald sportswriter Manny Navarro and published in the paper on Tuesday.

Read the entire Miami Herald story about Adam Reed at this link.

“I’m a little undersized,” Reed told Navarro in the Herald piece — with characteristic understatement. “But it’s, whatever. I don’t let my size stop me from doing anything.”

Bear in mind that the second-smallest player on the American Heritage team is 15 inches taller and 51 pounds heavier than Reed.

“It’s special to see somebody that diminutive, being dealt a tough hand, coming out here and working just like any other person,” says Patrick Surtain, a three-time Miami Dolphins Pro Bowl cornerback who now coaches the defense at American Heritage. “We don’t even look at Adam like that because he’s Adam to us, because he puts in the work like everybody else. He doesn’t want anything handed to him. He wants to earn it. And so far he has. It’s good to have somebody like that on your team.”

The head coach of the team, Mike Rumph — who had a five-season NFL career in San Francisco and Washington — says that Reed, though right now he’s the team’s fifth-stringer at running back, is likely to see playing time this year, though he hasn’t made any promises.

“Whether or not he gets playing time as a senior, it remains a mystery,” Rumph told the Herald. “But I have some plans and ideas to get him involved because he sacrificed the way everybody else sacrificed.”

The reason why Adam Reed has not been able to grow to a typical 17-year-old size is also a mystery. His mom says all she knows is that his body “doesn’t know what to do with growth hormones.”

[Image: Miami Herald Video Screen Grab]