Brandon Heyward Is Ready To Lead The Oak Ridge Wildcats In 2022

The four-star wideout spoke with me for a bit following Oak Ridge's Wednesday morning summer workout.

Welcome to the Friday Night Lights section here at the SRM newsletter. This is a section of the newsletter where I cover high school football both back home in Georgia and here in East Tennessee. Covering high school football is a passion of mine, and I hope that passion shines through in my stories that you’ll read in this very newsletter. I do hope that you enjoy it and type in your email below so you never miss an issue. This newsletter is delivered to your inbox, not your doorstep, daily. Happy reading.

I also host a very popular daily national sports podcast called ‘The Chase Thomas Podcast’ that you should very much subscribe to here.

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Four-star wideout Brandon Heyward getting ready to run a route on Wednesday morning at Oak Ridge.

Cincinnati Bengals’ star wideout Tee Higgins put Oak Ridge on the map during the Bengals’ unbelievable run to the Super Bowl in 2022. Even better for longtime Wildcat fans, Higgins was at the center of the action for one of the biggest plays in the game itself. Had the Bengals held on to defeat the Los Angeles Rams and become Super Bowl champions, the way in which Higgins shook off lockdown cornerback Jalen Ramsey for the long touchdown grab would have been lead the story on all of the major sports networks. Instead, though, the Rams and Matthew Stafford were clutch late and the Bengals lost.

The loss did not change the kind of season that Joe Burrow, Higgins and J’Marr Chase had, though. You would be hard-pressed to find another wide receiver trio as talented and as diverse as Chase, Higgins and Tyler Boyd. On a lot of other rosters, Higgins is likely a No. 1 option and the team is thrilled about it. In Cincy, it’s an embarrassment of riches at the moment around Burrow. Higgins is a star wideout in the NFL, but he had to start somewhere. We all do. Coming out of the Super Bowl, Higgins put Oak Ridge on the map. His emergence on the national level begs the question: will one day down the line four-star wideout Brandon Heyward do the same?

Only time will tell.

Heyward’s time at Oak Ridge has seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Not many kids begin their playing career fighting for a state title as a freshman only to win three games the following year.

Already, Heyward has gotten the opportunity to see the good and the bad that comes with sports. He has already gotten to be apart of both something extremely special and something extremely frustrating in his first two years of high school football.

Heyward gained all that vital experience as an underclassmen. Now, as a rising junior and a highly-recruited wideout, Heyward is using those first two years to lead the Wildcats back to the promise land. “This year I got a strong belief we make it back to state. I hope that we make it back to state. I see all my players, they grinding in the weight room, outside the weight room, coming to the field working by themselves. I feel like everybody pitching in for their part. We’re gonna have a strong bond this year. I feel like we’re gonna whoop some teams,” Heyward told me after summer workouts on Wednesday morning.

Coach Cummings highlighted Heyward’s leadership to open summer workouts to kick things off yesterday morning. As both an uppeclassman and four-star kid, Heyward takes responsibility in his role to lead by example. He works hard, and being a leader means a lot to him. Being a good leader does not just happen, though. Not everyone is cut out to be one. The followers will always outnumber the leaders.

With Heyward, though, he told me, “What makes me a good leader is me just thinking back to the past how I wasn’t a good leader. Even though I was young, I was still a viabal part to the team and stuff like that.” 

No coach expects a freshman to be a leader that early in his football career. Regardless of how talented a kid is.  It does say a lot, though, that Heyward recognizes the expectations change now, though, being a rising rising junior and a big-time recruit. 

He continued, “So this year, going into my junior year, I just openly grew up, realized that if I want to take control of my team, especially how I got all of the offers right now, I need to step up and lead them. Tell them not to walk on the field, get my push ups [sic] if I drop a pass, be disciplined. That’s how I really lead my team and they trust in me. They listen and we all be disciplined when that time comes.”

With a new coaching staff led by longtime successful high school coach Scott Cummings, Heyward’s leadership is vital to ensure buy-in across the board. Football is a team game, that much is not new. You need everybody on the same page, and you can always tell if a leadership void is present on a struggling team. You can sense it, even from the outside looking in.

Year 1 won’t be easy for Coach Cummings, as the ‘Cats open the season on the road for the first two weeks at South Doyle and then Bearden the week after. Then, no pressure, but the rivalry game against Clinton is right there at home in Week 3. 

For Heyward, he’s got a busy summer ahead of him before that first game against South Doyle. He’s going to travel and compete in some camps this summer, along with squeezing in both some official and nonofficial visits to various colleges around the country.

With YouTube and kids growing up nowadays being able to watch virtually any game they want to, I asked Heyward if he modeled his game after any wideout in particular. He told me, “I can’t say I actually just look at somebody and be like, ‘I want to be them.’”

He wants to be the best version of Brandon Heyward.