Graham-Kapowsin’s Daveon Superales is TNT’s 2023 All-Area player of the year
Sitting in the back seat of his girlfriend’s car on a fall afternoon in Graham two years ago, Daveon Superales glanced up from looking at his phone and saw a black pickup truck in the distance. He thought nothing of it.
When he looked up again a few seconds later, everything happened quickly. The Ram truck veered into their lane and struck their car head on, sending the Honda sedan into the air, flipping and rolling over multiple times. Superales remembers hanging upside down, unbuckling himself and crawling out of the car to get to the sidewalk, sharp pain jolting through his body.
“The worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life,” said Superales, who was a sophomore at Graham-Kapowsin High School at the time. “I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to move. I just wanted to stay still, close my eyes and go to sleep.”
His girlfriend (at the time) and her mom, who was in the passenger seat, both escaped with minimal injuries, but Superales wasn’t as lucky. The seatbelt that likely saved his life also cut his small intestine in half. He was taken to the emergency room and had immediate surgery.
That was around Week 3 of the high school football season during Superales’ sophomore season at Graham-Kapowsin. Those days, he was the backup quarterback to Joshua Wood, who led the Eagles to an undefeated season and the 2021 Class 4A state title.
Lying in the hospital bed in the days after his surgery, Superales wasn’t sure what his future held.
“I got really emotional,” he said. “I didn’t know if I was ever going to play football again.”
The doctors gave him a timetable of four to six months to return to action. He made it back in about two.
“All God’s doing,” Superales told The News Tribune at the G-K gym last week.
Eventually, he returned to full strength, with a six-inch vertical scar on his stomach the lasting physical evidence of that day’s crash. He had big shoes to fill after Wood — who was the TNT’s 2021 All-Area player of the year — graduated and went off to play at Fresno State. Superales filled them admirably, taking Graham-Kapowsin to the state tournament semifinals in his junior season.
He saved the best for last, taking Graham-Kapowsin all the way to the 4A state championship game in Husky Stadium in his senior year this fall. The Eagles fell to Lake Stevens in the title game, but Superales’ legacy in a long line of great G-K quarterbacks is intact after leading the Eagles to the 4A South Puget Sound League title.
Superales is The News Tribune’s 2023 All-Area player of the year.
If Dylan Morris was Graham-Kapowsin’s best passer and Joshua Wood was G-K’s best running quarterback, Superales married the two traits.
“When your quarterback has good feet and can take off and run a little bit, that allows you to be pretty versatile and dynamic,” said G-K coach Jeff Logan. “What sets Daveon apart is that he’s able to blend the two really well.”
The stats back it up: Superales completed 312-of-413 passes this season for 3,783 yards and 44 touchdowns and rushed 122 times for 797 yards and eight touchdowns. Some of those were designed runs, but Superales dazzled most when he went off script, escaping the pocket and making defenders miss. It’s something he picked up from watching Wood.
“Watching him extend plays with his feet is kind of what I picked up on,” he said. “Just the way he progresses, the way knows the game is crazy.”
Superales torched opponents through the air, also, throwing one of the prettiest deep balls of any quarterback in the area this fall.
“He can throw it from a ton of different arm angles, he’s got a very quick release,” Logan said. “He’s a very natural thrower of the football. … Then you see the escapability, a lot of things you just can’t teach, he’s got those.”
Logan thought back to the road game against Curtis, where Superales put on a show in front of the thousands of fans in attendance.
“There’s no way to teach making three or four guys miss during that game, or the double spin move, when he bounces off two guys and picks up another ten yards. Just a lot of elite moxie, things you can’t teach. It’s incredible to watch him out there.
“I kinda just had to start letting him cook.”
Superales said he was disappointed, of course, to fall short in the state championship game against Lake Stevens. He’s trying to be patient while he waits for a scholarship offer to come late in his recruiting cycle, too. He’s staying positive.
“It’s all God’s timing,” he said. “Whatever he has in plan for me, it’ll come, I just have to stay patient and wait. I know there’s going to be one coach that sees something in me and gives me the opportunity to go play football for them.”
