South Sound boasts trio of amazing prep linemen

Never before has the South Sound seen a trio of offensive tackles so talented, so coveted, so … big.

Puyallup High School’s Joshua Garnett is regarded by some as one of the top-20 recruits in the country, regardless of position.

Despite attending off-the-radar Tacoma Baptist, Walker Williams has proven himself to be worthy of attention from programs in the Big 10 and Pacific-12 conferences.

Zach Banner of Lakes High School is the biggest of all and boasts a whopping 42 scholarship offers – plus a dozen more for basketball.

All three seniors have been invited to play in nationally televised all-star games and the scholarship offers from college football bluebloods speak for themselves – these guys are good.

Banner, Garnett and Williams have all the athletic abilities – quickness, strength, size – but a stopwatch and tape measure can’t reveal everything.

JOSHUA GARNETT: PUYALLUP

Joshua Garnett is moving linemen at will.

No, the Puyallup High School star offensive tackle isn’t mauling them. He’s positioning his teammates for drills on a Thursday morning this month at Sparks Stadium.

With no coach around – per WIAA rules, coaches can’t work with players from Aug. 1 until the first day of practice – Garnett has taken charge. The workout is an extension of the regimen introduced by Puyallup offensive line coach Ray Brassard, who had the Vikings linemen flipping truck tires three days a week during the summer.

“My line coach knows as a senior leader I should be out here if I want to get the team better,” the 6-foot-5, 290-pound Garnett said. “Last year was an embarrassment. I’m trying to do what I can to make our team better. I already know we’re going to be better.”

Garnett is worth listening to. The Sporting News rated him as the 14th best senior in the country, regardless of position. He’s attended high-profile combines and camps, learning from current and retired NFL pros Russell Okung, Alex Boone and LeCharles Bentley. And he’s received a lifetime of lessons from his father, Scott Garnett, who played defensive line at the University of Washington from 1980-83 and three seasons in the NFL.

With so much knowledge, Garnett said he has a responsibility to share it with his teammates.

“If I can take what I learned and give it to them, even if they might not do it as crisply,” he said, “they can grasp the concept, keep working on it and they’ll become better.

“They’re serious about wanting to get better. If they want to take the time to come out here on a Thursday morning when they could be sleeping, I’m going to help them out.”

Garnett is dedicated to Puyallup avoiding a repeat of the 2010 season when the Vikings, who finished 3-7, endured their worst season in more than a decade. To ensure that doesn’t happen, he’s willing to try something different – if only for a few plays a game.

Puyallup has experimented during the summer with using Garnett, normally a defensive tackle or end, at outside linebacker. He embraces the wrinkle.

“We did it at camp and I’m a lot faster than I look,” he said. “I think we’re going to shock some people.”

Vikings coach Gary Jeffers said he expects Garnett will be a full-time player on offense and be part of a rotation on defense. Jeffers knows he’s got something special in Garnett, who was a two-way starter as a sophomore.

“It was pretty clear early on that he’d be (an NCAA) Division-I football player,” he said. “Did I anticipate how high he’d rise? No, but that’s because I’ve never been around a player as good as he’s become.”

Garnett has received more than 20 scholarship offers from schools such as Auburn, Michigan, Miami, Notre Dame, Oregon, USC and Washington. He has not scheduled any official visits, but said he will try to take one to Michigan on Sept. 10 – the same day Lakes’ Zach Banner will be in Ann Arbor – and another to Miami after he plays in the Under Armour All-American Bowl.

Though he plays tackle, some recruiting services rank him as a guard – Scout.com pegged him as the top-rated guard in the country. Garnett said he wants the opportunity to prove he can play tackle.

“A lot of people think I’m a guard, but all the coaches tell that they’ve seen my highlight film as a tackle, they’ve seen me at the camps as a tackle,” he said, “that’s what they offered me as.”

No matter the position, Jeffers expects big things from Garnett this fall.

“I’ve seen a change in his physical dominance,” Jeffers said. “He’s owning the fact that he’s a man amongst boys.”

ZACH BANNER: LAKES

Zach Banner has always been big.

The day he was born, he weighed 10 pounds, 1 ounce, and measured 24 inches long. His entire childhood was an extended growth spurt.

“When he was younger, every season he’d get a new wardrobe because he was growing so fast,” said his mother, Vanessa. “His grandma was always doing alterations.”

Now a senior at Lakes High School, the offensive tackle’s stature has reached mammoth proportions – he stands 6-9 and weighs 330 pounds. Blessed with athleticism rarely seen in players his size, Banner has received more than 40 football scholarship offers and another dozen for basketball.

But there’s more to Banner than his build. He oozes a larger-than-life charisma to match his size.

“His natural personality is outgoing,” Lancers football coach Dave Miller said. “He loves people, cares about people. He likes to connect with them. He’s always been like that.”

Banner is so engaging that earlier this year he was asked by the Clover Park and Tacoma school districts to speak to eighth-grade students and their parents about staying on top of academics and making the transition to high school.

With parents as school administrators – Vanessa is an assistant principal at Jason Lee Middle School in Tacoma and dad Ron Banner is principal of Mann Middle School in Lakewood – emphasizing education came easy.

“Don’t just scoot by,” Banner told the eighth-graders. “Just getting by doesn’t help you. You want to have good grades when you get to high school.”

Vanessa admitted it was a proud moment when she watched her son speak in front of her students and their parents at an eighth grade celebration in June at Jason Lee, an event that in the past has featured college professors as keynote speakers.

“It was very, very emotional for me to see him in that aspect,” she said. “He was phenomenal. He’s got a natural talent and definitely could be an inspirational speaker.”

Banner’s teammates and coaches recognized that right away. As a freshman, he played varsity, but only got into the game on special teams and in mop-up duty. He still found ways to make valuable contributions, earning the team’s inspirational award.

“He was the guy who, when we’re playing Eastside Catholic in the quarterfinals and down by three,” Miller said, “he’s on the sideline keeping the sideline roaring, doing whatever he can to help the team.”

Banner is respected by his classmates off the field, too. He was voted class president as a freshman, sophomore and junior, and he’ll be an ASB rep at Lakes this year. When asked what kind of duties a class president performs, Banner’s charm shines through.

“You pretty much handle everything that has to do with your class,” he said. “When it comes down to it, the president has take the blame if something goes good, but also share the wealth when something goes great.”

Lately, everything Banner touches turns to gold.

He was one of the first players in the country to be invited to the prestigious 2012 U.S. Army All-American Bowl, and helped the Lancers win the Class 3A boys basketball state championship in March.

He’s whittled his list of suitors to a Who’s Who among college football’s elite, including Alabama, Oklahoma, Washington, Oregon and USC. He’s scheduled official visits to Michigan (Sept. 10) and Notre Dame (Oct. 22) and plans to take three more in January.

Banner maintains that he wants to play football and basketball in college, but football will be his priority.

“I’m definitely going the road for football,” he said. “Hopefully one day make it to the NFL. High school comes first, then college, then the NFL.”

After reaching the semifinals each of the past three seasons, Banner isn’t shy about predicting big things for the Lancers this fall.

“We’re going to take that state trophy this year, for sure,” he said.

Everything about Banner is big, even his statements.

WALKER WILLIAMS: TACOMA BAPTIST

The hulking 6-foot-7, 320-pound senior offensive tackle from tiny Tacoma Baptist gave an oral commitment Friday to the University of Wisconsin.

“Making the call to tell the Wisconsin coaches, it was a feeling of relief,” Williams said. “They were really excited.”

Williams also had offers from Colorado, Oregon State, UCLA, Washington and Eastern Washington. But before those opportunities began arriving in March, he admitted to thinking that maybe he’d made a wrong decision by staying at Class 2B Tacoma Baptist.

After completing eighth grade, Williams said he thought about leaving the private school for a larger school – he lives in the Franklin Pierce School District – to get more exposure, but he’d attended Tacoma Baptist since kindergarten and wanted to stay with his friends.

“The main reason I would have switched would have been to get more exposure for college,” Williams said, “but I seem to be doing fine.”

Until this spring, however, Williams wondered if he’d made the right decision. He’d impressed scouts at camps and combines with his size and quickness, but he had yet to receive a scholarship offer.

“I’d been working really hard and coaches had been sending letters, but nothing hand-written,” he said. “No offers.”

Deep down, Williams knew the reason: he came from a small school. His game film was virtually useless to college coaches. They couldn’t glean any reliable information from his small-school football games.

Williams promoted himself, posting a highlight video and a workout video of himself on YouTube in the spring. He mailed highlight videos to every school in the Pacific-10 Conference, a few Big Ten programs, Notre Dame and some Western Athletic Conference teams. He said that garnered him more attention, but he still had to pass the eye test.

An unofficial visit to UCLA in March changed everything. He walked into a room and Bruins coach Rick Neuheisel gave Williams a stamp of approval.

“Oh, you really are 6-7,” Neuheisel blurted out, revealing a coach who’d seen too many exaggerated heights and weights on rosters.

From there, the offers rolled in, with Wisconsin and Oregon State following shortly after the UCLA trip.

“Things got rolling when UCLA offered,” Tacoma Baptist football coach and athletic director Mark Smith said. “We had a lot of people come through Tacoma Baptist that we’d never seen before. We’re obviously not the Lakes or Skylines of the world.”

Williams understands why it took longer than it would have for a large-school player, acknowledging that he faced obstacles that athletes from bigger schools didn’t.

“When they just see the game film and they don’t get to see me face-to-face and perform in person, they’re a little hesitant,” he said. “That’s completely understandable.”

Williams has the wisdom to realize that there’s more at stake than just a scholarship.

“Even if you don’t want to look at it this way, you are an investment to (coaches),” he said. “And if the investment doesn’t pay dividends down the road, they might not have a job down the road.”

That kind of deep understanding doesn’t surprise Smith.

“He’s a great thinker,” Smith said. “When we introduce a new concept or scheme, he’s asking ‘Why do this?’ ” It’s like having a coach on the field.”

It’s no surprise then that part of Wisconsin’s allure was its academic reputation, particularly its nuclear engineering program. Williams was able to tour the campus’ nuclear reactor laboratory during an unofficial visit last week.

“It was really cool,” said Williams, who is considering majoring in the pharmacy or engineering fields.

The trip was Williams’ to second to Wisconsin. He was on hand to watch the Badgers’ spring game in April, too.

Williams said that if he hadn’t initiated contact by sending a highlight DVD to Wisconsin, he would not have been on the Badgers’ radar.

Working hard in practice and on the field is only part of the recruiting game.

“You have to aggressively contact schools,” he said. “You definitely have to work hard (on the field), but you need a little bit of knowledge and guidance, know how to do your research when it comes to the recruiting world.”

Doug Pacey: 253-597-8271
doug.pacey@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/preps