Originally Posted by Dudley Do Right:
I'm new here but I've known Carson since he was a little kid. Glad to see he is becoming a fan favorite. Here are a few things I know about him.
In the weight room he will be one of the strongest non-lineman in the league. Kid is a monster with an unreal work ethic.
On the field he is exactly what you have seen. He won't have any 80 yard TD runs but he's not slow. His hip flexibility is better than people think, his vision is great, but most of all he is a bruiser. He always falls forward. Always. Watch the expressions of the guys who tackle him. It hurts to tackle him. He has great hands out of the backfield. If they ever release him and he catches a ball in open field he will flat out terrorize the DBs who have to tackle him. He is a way above average blocker, and when he played for me he was a great tackler. Call it contact courage. He has it in abundance. In fact one of our biggest challenges was getting him to run around people in open field. His preference is to steamroll anybody in his path.
Off the field you have a kid living his dream. He is a genuine, God-fearing young man who has a heart as big as his muscles. Back home he spends every opportunity in the youth football program where he played. He gets swamped by kids wanting autographs and he will sign every one with an ear-to-ear grin. He has a boyish charm that is captivating.
Oh, and his first (and only IMHO) nickname is War Horse. If you've seen the movie you understand.
You got a steal (pun intended) by getting him as a UFA but, likewise, he landed on the best possible team for his talents.
Enjoy.
Factoids: Carson went to high school with Trayce Jackson-Davis of the Golden State Warriors. He was teammates with Austin Booker who was taken in the 5th round of this year's draft by the Chicago Bears.
Love to hear this, thanks for the info!
[Reply]
WOW WOW WOWOW
Originally Posted by :
INDIANAPOLIS – After the play where it took eight Carmel players to bring down Center Grove running back Carson Steele on Saturday night, I went looking for Steele’s parents. Just to make sure they were OK. Carson Steele? He’s 6-2, 215 pounds. He has a nickname: War Horse. Yeah, he’s fine.
But his parents? I need to find out how they’re doing. Center Grove’s 20-17 loss to Carmel in the Class 6A championship game was a brutal game for everyone involved, most of all for Carson Steele, who pounded into the Carmel line 22 times for 92 yards. This whole junior season has been brutal on Steele, who ran for 1,703 yards as a freshman and 2,270 as a sophomore, but missed the first six games this year with a pulled hamstring. Then he missed the next five games with what has been called a broken ankle.
Only because Center Grove refused to go down easily in the playoffs — the Trojans went 4-5 in the regular season, then won four straight tournament games — was Steele able to return this season.
He played in the regional win against Warren Central, logging 20 carries for 91 yards. Then at semistate against Ben Davis: 21 carries for 92 yards. Now this, the 6A title game against Carmel. And on the play that sent me flying into the stands — ask the Center Grove fans; I was hopping railings and climbing fences to check on Joe and Angela Steele — their son gets a handoff into the teeth of the Carmel defense. He bounces off a defensive tackle and heads outside. He stiff-arms a linebacker. Steps out of a tackle of another linebacker. Then three Carmel defenders arrive as one, slowing Steele’s progress. Two more Carmel players jump onto the scrum, and down they go.
So I’m looking up into the front row of the Center Grove cheering section, asking fans to point me to Carson Steele’s family. Well, Joe Steele sees me down there. He reads my lips, I guess, because he sees me mouthing the words “Carson Steele” and he comes hurrying down. Now Joe Steele is asking me a question.
“Is he hurt?”
“I don’t know,” I tell Carson Steele’s dad, and give him my name and occupation. “I was just coming up there to see how his mom and dad are holding up.”
Joe Steele literally exhales in relief and beckons me into the crowd to come sit with him. As he walks back to his seat, he leaves me at the railing. And he leaves me speechless.
“He’s playing with a broken left foot,” Joe Steele tells me. “And a broken right hand.”
And a …
What?
Center Grove kept winning, so...
Turns out, Carson Steele didn’t have an ankle issue. It was his foot, and it was broken, and it was broken in the silliest — and the most infuriating — of ways.
Again, remember what Carson has been through already: A pulled hamstring kept him out of the first six games, but he’s ready to return against Pike on Oct. 4. It’s a few days before the game, at home with his dad, when it happens. They’re playing catch in their front room, inside the house, when Carson casually leaps for a soft toss. He comes down on one of those plates that some houses have on the floor, a plate with two electrical outlets. Landing on that plate just right … well, his foot snapped.
“Crazy,” Joe Steele is saying from his seat in the Center Grove cheering section. It’s the third quarter, and the Trojans are rallying from a 20-3 deficit as we’re talking. “We’ve thrown the ball literally thousands of times. That’s never happened. But it happened before the Pike game.”
Carson thought he was done for the year. First, Center Grove was just 2-4 entering the Pike game. And: His foot was broken. He was done for the season, he just knew it.
But he had the surgery, and the Trojans beat Pike. Then they beat Lawrence North. Daniel Weems and Connor Delp were running for almost 2,000 yards combined, and sophomore Tayven Jackson was outgrowing his tag as “Trayce Jackson-Davis’ kid brother” and becoming known for his quarterback play.
Now Center Grove is in the playoffs, and it’s rolling. The Trojans beat Columbus East by 24 points. They beat Franklin Central by 35.
Three weeks after foot surgery, Carson Steele is ready to play. They beat Warren Central, then Ben Davis. But it’s in the Ben Davis game when Steele reaches for a pass, snags his right hand in his own jersey, where a Ben Davis player hits it with the helmet. The damn thing swells up. He’s pretty sure it’s broken, but let me tell you how tough Carson Steele is:
He refused to go to the doctor. He knew what would happen if his hand were broken, so he kept the news to himself, telling only his family. He was scheduled to see the doctor on Sunday, the day after the 6A title game.
I’m asking him: Sunday?
“He’s coming to the house,” Steele says. “I’m pretty sure I know what he’ll say.”
The whole thing is preposterous. After the game, Carmel coach John Hebert is telling me how tough Carson Steele is.
“He’s got a lot of heart,” Hebert is saying, “to be back after what he went through. He’s a great competitor, and he’s so hard to bring down. I don’t know how many carries or yards he had, but every time he came out of the game, we were breathing a sigh of relief. He’s a really tough kid.”
I’m about to tell the Carmel coach just how tough:
Did you know he was playing with two broken bones? The foot, I’m telling the Carmel coach, and a broken hand?
Now John Hebert is sounding like me, about an hour earlier.
“What?”
'War Horse' has one more year
Steele finished his abbreviated 2019 season with 275 yards in three games, giving him 4,248 yards entering his senior season. If he has another year like his freshman or sophomore season — if he can stay healthy in 2020, as he was healthy in 2017 and ’18 — he’ll most likely pass the 6,000-yard mark and become one of the top 20 rushers in state history, despite playing just three games as a junior.
For the longest time, he felt like this season had been taken from him. But then he had the surgical procedure, and his teammates kept winning. And now Steele doesn’t know what to think, because he got farther than he ever has: the state title game.
“It’s been a weird year, and a hard year,” he says. “It was real hard watching them, but they came back as a team. Winning those first two playoff games got me here. Without them, I wouldn’t be here in the first place. I love my team, and I’ll play for them until I drop dead.”
Until you … what?
Well, they call him “War Horse” for a reason. And they’ve called him that since he was in fifth grade, galloping all over the other fifth-grade teams in the area. This was in 2013, two years after the Steven Spielberg movie “War Horse,” and a youth coach gave him the moniker. It stuck.
“He’s a leader,” Moore says of Steele. “The ‘War Horse’ is our leader. They can sense his presence and feel his emotion. It raises everyone’s morale when he’s on the field.”
As the Center Grove comeback is getting closer — as Tayven Jackson is throwing two beautiful touchdown passes in the fourth quarter to draw the Trojans within 20-17 — teammates keep approaching Steele on the sideline when the defense is on the field. They’re tapping him on the chest or helmet, asking if he’s OK. They know he’s hurting, even if they don’t know exactly where, or how much.
Steele nods at them, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s a quiet kid, even on the sideline. A leader by example. And as Carmel gets the final first down it needs to run out the clock, keeping the ball away from Tayven Jackson and Carson Steele, the “War Horse” walks slowly onto the field to shake the Greyhounds’ hands.
When that’s over, one last Carmel player peels back and chases down Steele. It’s Greyhounds defensive tackle Cole Brevard, a 6-3, 305-pound Penn State recruit. He just wants to grab Steele one more time, this time affectionately, hugging him and calling him a single word:
“Tough.”
[Reply]
Originally Posted by Dudley Do Right:
I'm new here but I've known Carson since he was a little kid. Glad to see he is becoming a fan favorite. Here are a few things I know about him.
In the weight room he will be one of the strongest non-lineman in the league. Kid is a monster with an unreal work ethic.
On the field he is exactly what you have seen. He won't have any 80 yard TD runs but he's not slow. His hip flexibility is better than people think, his vision is great, but most of all he is a bruiser. He always falls forward. Always. Watch the expressions of the guys who tackle him. It hurts to tackle him. He has great hands out of the backfield. If they ever release him and he catches a ball in open field he will flat out terrorize the DBs who have to tackle him. He is a way above average blocker, and when he played for me he was a great tackler. Call it contact courage. He has it in abundance. In fact one of our biggest challenges was getting him to run around people in open field. His preference is to steamroll anybody in his path.
Off the field you have a kid living his dream. He is a genuine, God-fearing young man who has a heart as big as his muscles. Back home he spends every opportunity in the youth football program where he played. He gets swamped by kids wanting autographs and he will sign every one with an ear-to-ear grin. He has a boyish charm that is captivating.
Oh, and his first (and only IMHO) nickname is War Horse. If you've seen the movie you understand.
You got a steal (pun intended) by getting him as a UFA but, likewise, he landed on the best possible team for his talents.
Enjoy.
Factoids: Carson went to high school with Trayce Jackson-Davis of the Golden State Warriors. He was teammates with Austin Booker who was taken in the 5th round of this year's draft by the Chicago Bears.
Speaking of seeming nice, you definitely seem nice!
[Reply]
