Daniel Shoch stepped up in the pocket and rolled out to his right. The quarterback at East Coweta (Ga.) High School — under pressure all night — saw his receiver open for a split second.
But there was a problem. Travis Hunter was on the other team.
“I threw it to where I thought only my receiver would be able to break on it fast enough to get back down to the ball,” Shoch said.
Predictably, this did not end well for East Coweta.
Hunter broke on the ball, snatched it out of nowhere and took it 70 yards the other way for a pick six on that Friday night in September 2021.
FSU commit Travis Hunter with the PICK 6 🔥 @TravisHunterJr pic.twitter.com/oWH82txcHP
— Overtime (@overtime) September 25, 2021
“I came to the sideline, our two backup quarterbacks, I remember them saying, ‘Look dude, that’s the No. 1 player in the country. We were standing on the sideline saying, ‘Throw it. Throw it. Oh crap, there’s Travis Hunter,’” said Shoch, now a student at the University of North Georgia.
Three years later, Hunter, the two-way sensation at Colorado and a Heisman Trophy hopeful, is still the best player in the country, or at least the most dynamic. He has played 844 total snaps (414 on defense and 430 on offense), 210 more than any other player in college football this season, according to TruMedia. His impact is unprecedented in the modern era.
Generational.#Big12FB | @CUBuffsFootball pic.twitter.com/jULOO67wZ4
— Big 12 Conference (@Big12Conference) October 28, 2024
No one in Georgia is surprised.
For those who had the privilege of competing against Hunter when he was the nation’s top recruit out of Collins Hill High School in Suwanee, Ga., in the Class of 2022, this was only a matter of time.
“That’s the thing people don’t understand,” said Lenny Gregory, Hunter’s head coach at Collins Hill and now the head coach at Gordon Central (Ga.) High. “We saw (this) every day in practice.
“He’s like a human matrix.”
In the summer of 2018, Gregory received a call from someone at the local recreation department’s football program. There was a rising ninth grader, “a really athletic kid,” who had mentioned he’d be enrolling at Collins Hill in the coming weeks.
“So I met him on a Monday morning,” Gregory said of his first encounter with Hunter. “And I asked him, ‘Are you a baller?’ just kind of messing around with him. He just kind of, not rolled his eyes, but he just gave me this look and he says, ‘Baller? You haven’t seen a baller until you’ve seen me.’”
Gregory, taking note of Hunter’s confidence, told the 15-year-old to show up the following morning for a conditioning test.
All of Collins Hill’s players had been training together since the first week of June and spent every Tuesday running 200-meter dashes to prepare for the dreaded fitness assessment. To pass the test, players would need to run a series of six 200-meter dashes, each in 32 seconds or less. They’d have a one-minute break in between each run.
“So I said, ‘Are you in shape? Are you going to be ready to do that?’” Gregory said. “(Hunter) goes, ‘Oh, no problem, Coach. I can do that easy.’ And so I’m thinking, ‘Yeah he’s gonna run one or two and be throwing up everywhere.’”
The next morning, Hunter ran his first 200 with the Eagles defensive backs — a group of fast, athletic and experienced players.
“He smokes everybody. Bam,” Gregory said. “And I thought, ‘He’s done. This kid ain’t gonna be able to finish.’”
Then the second 200 came around.
“Boom. Smokes everybody. And I walk up to him, I say, ‘Are you all right?’ And he’s just standing there and he’s not even breathing hard. At all,” Gregory said. “And he goes, ‘Coach, this ain’t nothing. Let’s go again.’”
By the end of the test, seniors were splashed out on the track, exhausted and in pain.
Hunter, meanwhile, ran every 200-meter dash in 28 seconds or less, shattering the 32-second requirement.
“I’ve been doing the conditioning test for 20 years and I’ve never seen anybody do this,” Gregory said. “I’m like, ‘This guy is going to be special.’ I knew it right there.”
A few weeks later, Gregory and his team traveled to play Marietta High School, one of Georgia’s top programs at the Class 7A level.
Hunter was still raw as a freshman, but Gregory had already seen enough.
“We were warming up and we didn’t really have a chance to win that game. They were much better than us,” Gregory said. “But I remember pointing out Travis to my dad, who was standing (with me) before the game and I said, ‘You see that kid right there? That kid’s going to be one of the best players in the country. He’s unbelievable.’”
Hunter’s freshman season was relatively quiet, but he exploded onto the scene in the talent-rich Atlanta area the following fall.
As a sophomore, he finished with 49 catches for 919 yards and 12 touchdowns as a receiver and seven interceptions as a defensive back. He took another step as a junior, with 137 catches for 1,746 yards and 24 touchdowns on offense and eight picks on defense. He missed one month of regional play as a senior due to injury but still caught 85 passes for 1,284 yards and 12 touchdowns to go along with four interceptions.
“I’ve been coaching for 20 years or so and he’s easily the most dynamic player that I’ve ever come across in high school football,” said Philip Jones, the head coach at Brookwood (Ga.) High School. “It’s not even close.”
Jones first faced Hunter when Brookwood played Collins Hill to open the 2021 season at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, but he’d previously watched him dominate — on both sides of the ball — in 7-on-7 games over the summer.
“He’s scoring every time he touches the ball,” Jones said. “At one point, he’s so wide open he catches it and he does a backflip in the end zone.
“Coach Gregory, who was his coach in high school, I saw him afterwards. We’re eating lunch and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Coach.’ It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before just watching a kid do that. And then coach Gregory didn’t even say anything really. He just kind of took his hands like he was wiping off crumbs or whatever off his hands and he just looked at me and was like, ‘Just get him on the bus, Coach. Just get him on the bus.’ He was like, ‘That’s my only job this year. Just get him on the bus every game.’”
Hunter dazzled in that 2021 opener, catching 13 passes for 232 yards and two touchdowns while also intercepting a pass thrown by current Alabama backup quarterback Dylan Lonergan. Oh, he also threw a 28-yard touchdown pass on a reverse in Collins Hill’s 36-10 win.
“This. Kid,” Philips said. “In-sane.”
Two weeks later, Collins Hill played Greenville Christian Academy, a small private school from Mississippi, in the annual Atlanta Freedom Bowl. Greenville Christian coach Jon Reed McLendon said it felt “surreal” when his players found out they’d be playing against Hunter, whose highlights they’d already devoured on YouTube.
McLendon and his staff made sure to stress to their defenders that week in practice that they’d need to know where Hunter was at all times. Sure, he was dangerous on defense — “You’re almost just holding your breath, just hoping that disaster doesn’t happen,” McLendon said — but the idea of Hunter running loose on offense?
“It doesn’t necessarily matter if you cover him or not,” McLendon said. “That to me, was a little scarier.”
Greenville Christian played zone coverage that night, deciding that it was better to make sure not to let Hunter beat them with big plays. They rushed three and dropped eight as though they were facing an Air Raid offense.
The strategy worked … sort of. Hunter caught only four passes for 28 yards and no touchdowns, but Collins Hill won the game, 37-22.
McLendon looks back on the game with mixed emotions.
“On one hand, you’re really proud of the fact that our defense did a good job that night of limiting him,” he said, laughing. “But because it’s so special, just as a guy that loves football, you almost would’ve liked to in-person been able to see more of it.”
Alpharetta High School coach Jason Kervin joked he’d be happy to send McLendon some of Hunter’s highlights after Collins Hill beat his team in 2020 and 2021 by a combined score of 72-22.
“When we played them in the playoffs (in 2020), I said (to our defensive coordinator), ‘Look dude, I don’t care where they put him, we’ve got to double him. … Give everybody everything else they want,”‘ Kervin said.
“(Hunter still) scored the first two drives of the game. You don’t stop a kid like that.”
Hunter capped off his career by leading Collins Hill to the first state championship in school history. He was committed to Florida State for much of the 2022 cycle but — in one of the biggest recruiting shockers ever — flipped to Jackon State on the first day of the early signing period. He played one season in the SWAC before following Deion Sanders to Colorado.
Gregory has been fielding calls over the past few months from NFL teams about Hunter, who is almost a lock to be a top-five pick in the 2025 draft. The coach has made it clear to anyone who asks that as long as Hunter stays healthy, nothing is stopping him.
“I think the kid could play both ways in the NFL,” he said. “He’s the best skill kid I’ve ever coached or I’ve ever been around that I’ve been able to work with. And I coached in the Under Armour (high school All-America) game, like, seven times. So I’ve seen NFL guys and I’ve seen a lot. But I’ve never seen anybody like him as a skill player.”
No one has.
“We’ve played against Will Anderson and Justin Fields and those guys,” said John Reid, the head coach at Georgia powerhouse Rome High School. “You’re talking to a guy who’s seen some really good players. … But the Hunter kid is different.”
“I coached George Pickens and Marlon Humphrey,” said Kervin from Alpharetta. “I know what a first-round draft pick looks like in high school and you don’t mess around with those kids, I can tell you. Guys like that are gonna make you look stupid.”
As Colorado heads toward the final third of its season, Hunter is on pace to once again earn first-team All-America honors and is very likely to be in New York in December as a Heisman finalist. Last Saturday, Hunter caught nine passes (on nine targets) for 153 yards and two touchdowns to lead the Buffaloes to a win over Cincinnati — their sixth of the season, ensuring a trip to a bowl game in Sanders’ second season.
Across the country, those from Hunter’s home state of Georgia continue to cheer from afar.
“I think that he’s a Hall of Fame player. I can’t see how he couldn’t be,” Gregory said. “Just stay focused and keep doing what he’s doing and he’ll end up putting one of those gold jackets on.”
(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Dustin Bradford / Getty Images; courtesy of Travis Hunter)
