High school hero Tre'Von Morgan is ready to rewrite the script at Kentucky

by:Nick Roush02/28/21

@RoushKSR

(Photo by Kevin Whitlock/ IndeOnline.com/ USATSI)

You’ve seen the movies. The ones where the entire town is enthralled by the high school football team. The pressure feels insurmountable, adversity strikes, yet the team still overcomes all odds as the conquering heroes.

Hollywood makes it sound too good to be true, and it almost always is. Remember the Titans and Friday Night Lights were embellished to various degrees, but it’s just a movie. It’s fine. Surely, nothing like that ever happens in real life, right? Wrong.

Tre’Von Morgan lived the life of a protagonist in a dramatic high school football film. He performed under pressure. He overcame obstacles. He brought his proud program back to the promised land. He earned a scholarship to a Big Ten program. The first three acts of the Tre’Von Morgan Massillon Football movie could not have been scripted more perfectly. Nothing went according to plan in the fourth act. Now, he’s out to rediscover himself in the fifth act at the University of Kentucky.

The Birthplace of Professional Football

The move allusion might be too on the nose, considering a critically-acclaimed documentary was made about Morgan’s alma mater. A Sundance Selection in 2001, in the opening five minutes of “Go Tigers!” a newborn is given a Massillon Tigers football, a casket featuring the beloved mascot Obie is on display and the live tiger cub mascot scratches a five-year-old. It only gets wilder from there.

Roger Ebert described the film, which is available to rent on Amazon for $3.99, as “a documentary about a town of 33,000 so consumed by football it makes South Bend and Green Bay look distracted.” Chris Easterling, a UK grad from nearby Canal Fulton, Oh. that currently covers the team for the Massillon Independent, likened Tigers football at Massillon Washington High School to a religion.

“It is a town that lives, breathes, dies with its high school football program,” Easterling said. “It is a town obsessed with high school football. Playing football at Massillon is a lot like playing basketball at Kentucky. You are a star in the town.”

The Gold Standard of High School Football comes with a few perks. Massillon’s 80,000 sq. ft. Paul David Athletic Center is almost twice the size of the Cleveland Browns’ indoor practice facility. The stadium’s video scoreboard has the same specs as the one at FirstEnergy Stadium in Cleveland and is actually operated by the same person.

To understand why Massillon takes its football so seriously, look no further than its stadium’s namesake. Paul Brown Tiger Stadium was constructed in 1939 and currently seats over 16,800 fans every Friday night. A four-time national championship-winning coach at Washington Massillon in the 30s, Brown’s hometown is known as the “Birthplace of Professional Football” and the “City of Champions,” even though the Tigers were in a championship drought when Morgan began suiting up in orange and black on Friday nights, carrying the pressure of an entire town.

(Glenn B. Dettman / Massillon Independent)

 Great Expectations

The name Morgan carries weight in Massillon. Tre’Von has seemingly countless relatives that were once the town’s brightest stars. His cousin, Brandon Jackson, was an offensive lineman that lettered at Kentucky from 1994-95. His uncle, Marco Morgan, was better at basketball, playing collegiately for Happy Osborne at Georgetown College. Tre’s father, Christian, played running back at Akron after teaming up with the star of “Go Tigers,” Ellery Moore.

A familiar name for longtime Kentucky fans, most remember Moore for earning SEC All-Freshman Honors at UK in 2001 and consistently causing disruptions from the Wildcats’ defensive line until his career concluded in 2004. For film-watchers, Moore was an outspoken high school senior with a checkered past, thrust into a difficult situation.

Facing a financial crisis in 1999, the town of Massillon needed to pass a tax levy to keep the school district afloat. If not, teachers and coaches would lose jobs. Instead of enlisting a politician to stump in front of hundreds following a parade, Moore was the person tasked to convince people to vote yes to a new tax. What seems unusual from afar, more than 20 years later Moore considered it business as usual.

“Whatever comes with being a captain, a leader and a ‘star’ in our town… you just take it. Like there’s no pressure. It doesn’t feel heavy at all. It’s just your normal day-to-day. You get to a point where you were literally bred for those moments,” Moore said. “You are who you are. We know who you are and there’s an expectation to go with that.”

Expectations are high for every player. Those are amplified for a guy with the last name Morgan.

“When you’re the son of a former Tiger that was a Division I football player, an All-Ohio player, it just adds more pressure on you,” says Easterling. “The great thing about Tre is, he was a great kid, one, and two, I thought hew did a great job handling it because he kind of did a good job blocking everything out.”

He heard the noise, he just did not listen to it. He knew the only way to silence any doubt was to become the best Morgan that ever played at Massillon.

“I told myself that I would have to work my tail off to make a name for myself,” Morgan told KSR. “I know everybody knows who my family is, so they they kind of expected me to be as good or even better. And, I mean, I guess I lived up to the family name myself.”

The proof is in the pudding.

Rivalry Heroics

The 6-foot-6 wide receiver played like a four-star recruit in his senior season. Entering the final game of the year Morgan had 23 catches for 454 yards and nine touchdown receptions, along with a couple of special teams scores. Only archrival Canton McKinley stood in-between Massillon and an undefeated regular season. To call it the biggest rivalry in high school sports is not an exaggeration. After all, you can find a line for the game in Las Vegas sports books.

“That rivalry is the climbing of Mt. Everest,” Morgan said. “It’s the top of everything. It’s the best in football. It’s the Mecca, really. I loved it so much.”

In the previous season Morgan was the hero in a one-point Tigers’ victory. After dropping an early pass in the end zone, he received redemption on the final drive, taking one reception 52 yards down the field to set up an 8-yard go-ahead touchdown in front of 14,000+ fans at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium. Undefeated against McKinley in his previous two appearances, Morgan was prepared to end his career without a blemish in the rivalry.

Like every hero, adversity struck at the worst time.

A Massillon kickoff in the first half of the 2018 contest ended with Morgan on the ground. The wide receiver broke his hand while trying to make a tackle. In spite of the pain, Morgan remained in the game. His number was called near the end zone, but his acrobatic touchdown reception was ruled out of bounds.

Even though he did not make the game-winning play, Massillon defeated McKinley 24-17, improving the wide receiver’s record to 3-0 against his rival. The pass-catcher continued to play throughout the playoffs with a broken hand. He caught 16 passes for 237 yards and three scores after suffering the injury, including a 58-yard touchdown in the state semifinal to take Massillon to its first state championship game in 13 years.

Morgan’s game-winning touchdown at McKinley in 2017. Photo by Kevin Whitlock | Massillon Independent.

Morgan made one big play after another under immense pressure with a broken hand to give his a team a chance to end his final season with an unblemished record and the school’s first state title since 1970. Unfortunately, the Tigers came up short of their ultimate goal in the Division II final, falling to powerhouse Archbishop Hoban.

Instead of a Disney ending, the conclusion of Morgan’s career went off the Hollywood script, leaving the protagonists to learn life lessons from a loss, rather than a victory. Nevertheless, there’s no denying Morgan lived up to the lofty expectations.

“Without a doubt, and he got better and better every year,” said Moore, who is now the color commentator for Massillon football games on ESPN 990-WTIG, “It was absolutely wonderful to watch his growth.”

After accomplishing almost every possible goal in his high school career, everything changed once he left Massillon.

Michigan State Setbacks

In February of 2019 Morgan put pen to paper and signed with Michigan State, effectively inking a binding agreement to live under the power of Murphy’s Law. An academic issue delayed his arrival in East Lansing. Almost as soon as he arrived on campus, Morgan suffered a season-ending knee injury in practice. While rehabilitating his surgically-repaired knee, the coach that recruited him to Michigan State abruptly resigned. A month later, coronavirus closed down the country.

Whatever could go wrong, went wrong.

The seemingly unending domino of disasters did not stop there. The Big Ten announced in August it would play an all-conference schedule. Less than a week after releasing the schedule, they canceled the season. Eventually they came to their wits, only in time for each team to play eight games.

Through it all Morgan continued to work his way back onto the football field. Eventually, perseverance paid off. In the penultimate game of the season, the wide receiver’s efforts were rewarded; he caught two passes for 46 yards and his first collegiate touchdown.

https://twitter.com/RespectDaBeard1/status/1337824608423055362?s=20

Morgan returned to the comfort of an end zone, yet the familiar warm feeling was nowhere to be found.

Fresh Start

I spoke to Morgan for this story about a week after he announced his intent to transfer to Kentucky. Ready to answer questions about UK, he was pleasantly surprised that many of my questions concerned his high school career at Massillon. It was fresh on his mind a day after he spent hours pouring through old footage from Paul Brown Tiger Stadium.

“It’s the best city in the world to play football, I’ll tell you that. Words don’t do it justice to even explain the amount of excitement, the amount of rush, enjoyment. I’m talking from (pep) rallies, driving up and down Lincoln Way, jerseys to helmets to the field, to practice, the people, the tradition, the love — Football in Massillon is like no other. I will never get that back,” he said.

“To have the career I had there, to even go back and look back and watch those videos and stuff like that, just the emotion I get from it is is crazy. I still get those chills from even watching it.”

From 1999 to 2004 Friday Night Lights, Remember the Titans and Varsity Blues grossed a quarter-billion dollars. They were Hollywood hitmakers not because of the original storylines, but because of the emotion they drew out of every single passionate viewer. It struck a chord for those who glorified their playing days and in the young kids who dreamed of incredible accomplishments in the future.

Morgan lived that life. He scored a game-winning touchdown in a 100-year old rivalry in front of thousands of people at Hall of Fame Stadium. Two years later he caught his first collegiate touchdown in an empty 100,000-seat stadium.

The emotion, the joy, I feel like I kinda lost it in a way for a second,” Morgan said. “But I know it was always there, so that’s why I made the switch (to Kentucky).”

After sending a text to Vince Marrow, it took only four days for Morgan to make his move to Lexington official. Following in the footsteps of many others from Northeast Ohio that call Kentucky home, nobody was happier for Morgan than Ellery Moore.

“I had him call me right away because I got goosebumps. I was so pumped and so excited that it was happening, it was almost like me signing,” Moore said. “I think UK hit a home run with him, I really do. I think they’re going to get something special.”

Morgan is looking for something special. He wants football to give him goosebumps again and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to make Kentucky his happily ever after.

“I want it all, honestly. It really is hard to put it into words just to know how much I really do want this,” Morgan said. “It’s definitely gonna happen.”

 

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2024-03-28