LONE STAR
When Quinn Ewers was a young boy, he and his father, Curtis, would sometimes head up to the high school field in Pleasanton, Texas, to play football. “We had a lot of fun,” Curtis says. “I’d get down on my knees and we’d play tackle, and then we’d just throw the ball back and forth.” ¶ One day, another father-son duo showed up to play catch. “My son wanted to be a quarterback, and I was going to teach him to throw,” says Ryan Smith, who lived in Pleasanton at the time. “I saw Curtis and Quinn out there. Quinn was slinging perfect spirals. As they were leaving, I asked Curtis how old his son was. He said, ‘Three.’ It was just ridiculous.” ¶ Years later, after the Smith and Ewers families became friends, Smith told Curtis that after he and Quinn left the field that day, Smith turned to his son and asked, “Well, how do you feel about playing running back?”
IT’S A COOL AND RAINY SPRING DAY IN NORTH TEXAS
, and Quinn Ewers has just arrived at an afternoon practice in the massive indoor football field at Southlake Carroll Senior High School in the Dallas–Fort Worth suburb of Southlake. Already today, he has logged a 6:45 a.m. weight-lifting session and analyzed game film with coaches and teammates, gone to school (virtually, due to the coVid pandemic), studied for a final exam in his forensics class, and driven to Fort Worth for an hour-and-a-half post-school workout with the movement performance trainer Bobby Stroupe, who also happens to work with Kansas City Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
Ewers, a rising senior, is wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt adorned with a deer antler print for the thirty-minute practice, part of Southlake’s off-season program. He laces up his size thirteen Adidas cleats. And then the Southlake quarterback, who is the consensus number one high school football player in the country according to ESPN and the leading recruiting sites, Rivals and 247Sports, lopes his way out to the middle of the field.
He is impossible to miss. At six foot three and 210 pounds, Ewers is bigger than most of the linebackers practicing nearby, his musculature more “hoss thick” than sculpted. His hair, naturally brown, is bleached a frosty blond, a homemade job done by his mother, Kristen. The hair bleaching is a tradition on Southlake’s team, done every year during the playoffs to honor a towheaded former coach who died young. Ewers and a handful of other players have opted to keep it year-round, but it is his locks that stand out, thanks mainly to the cascading mullet that nearly touches his shoulders.
Ewers fiddles with a football as he off a steel beam on the facility’s ceiling, a feat that elicits oohs and aahs and one loud and distinct “Yeah, Quinn!” from his teammates.
