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LEOLA GAY BREEDLOVE 72 yrs young, of Hamlin, WV passed away: October 23, 2022. Funeral service will be 12 p.m., Thursday, October 27, 2022 at …
Pennsylvania offensive lineman Cooper Young maximized his official visit to West Virginia’s campus this weekend with a commitment to the Mountaineer program on Sunday morning.
Rated as one of the top interior linemen in Pennsylvania by multiple analysts, Young is a thick, strongly-built blocker with the size (6-5, 300 lbs.) to be a standout at an interior line position.
He demonstrates good movement for his size, and can pull and execute trap blocks, but his strength is in his punch, contact and finishing ability, in which he often drives defenders out of the play or knocks them off their feet entirely.
In executing his assignments, he shows the ability to get low and uncoil through contact, and continues to look for targets once his initial foe is accounted for.
Young also shows good technique with his hands, extending through the initial hit to maximize force and keep foes off-balance all the way through plays. He also flashes ability to fend off defenders who try to cut him to get him out of plays, pushing them to the ground to remove them from the action while keeping his feet.
Young will begin his career as an interior lineman at WVU, but also shows the ability to get to the corner or downfield at the front of plays.
That will help him in with outside zone and combination block schemes, and while he’s more quick than fast, he shows no trouble with finding and getting to blocking targets in the open field.
The Downington West High School standout, who is also an accomplished baseball player, had offers from Pitt, Syracuse, Virginia, Maryland, Temple, Buffalo, Bowling Green, Penn, Yale and Kent State in addition to West Virginia.
Defensive lineman Eamon Smalls followed a couple of hours later with his verbal to the Mountaineer program.
With his excellent size (6-2, 300 lbs.), Smalls might be expected to rely heavily on that advantage, especially against smaller foes, but he also displays a couple of advanced techniques in combating offensive line opponents.
His swim move is good, and while he sometimes gets too high and exposes some surface area to blockers, his ability to get his arms over the pads and move his opposite number often leaves him clear paths into the backfield.
Once he gets that advantage, he also does a good job of either finishing the move with a club to create more space, or wedging himself into the resulting gap to leverage penetration.
He shows the ability to split double teams, and does a good job of diagnosing the play early in its development.
While Smalls is clearly ticketed for a nose or defensive tackle position at WVU, he appears comfortable lining up anywhere from head up over the center to the guard-tackle gap. When he does get cleanly contacted and engaged, he has the ability to break it, and shows good tenacity in fighting through blocks and pursuing the ball. He keeps his head up and his eyes on the play, allowing him to make some tackles out of his area and provide secondary support if an initial stop isn’t made cleanly.
Smalls also noted that he has dropped more than 40 pounds since the end of last season, so he may well have the ability to demonstrate even more quickness in his senior season.
Like most defensive linemen, consistent pad level will be a key for his development, but his natural abilities, size and good techniques in other areas of play will give him a good foundation when he begins his college career.
Smalls had offers from South Carolina, East Carolina, Tulane, Charlotte, Coastal Carolina, Georgia Southern, Eastern Michigan and Liberty in addition to WVU. Clearly, schools in his region were aware of his talent, but WVU was able to jump in and get what could be a mid-point anchor for its defenses of the future.
West Virginia, now holding nine recruits in its 2023 class, is 27th in the On3.com recruiting rankings.
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