Practices for fall sports began this week on Wednesday, but one Juanita High School football player has already had a busy summer.
Salvon Ahmed, 17, has more Pac-12 offers than toes, and led the Rebels to the quarterfinals of the state tournament as a junior. He turned heads at a top-level Nike camp in June, running the 40-yard-dash in 4.32 seconds.
A few weeks ago, Ahmed was invited to play in the Army All-American Bowl, one of the most-prestigious events for high school athletes in the nation. Only five players from the state of Washington made the 2017 roster. He’s accepted, of course, but when it comes to college, the decision rests as much outside of football as on the gridiron.
Ahmed’s five favorite schools, all of which have scholarship offers on the table, are Oregon, Washington, USC, Stanford and Notre Dame.
“Those five schools are schools that preach a lot more to me than just football,” Ahmed said. “They preach to me what they can do outside of football for me, as far as connections, job-wise, things like that.”
Ahmed said Juanita football coach Lele Teo challenged him to ask where he’d be happy if he didn’t have football.
“You’ve got the jerseys, the coaches, the players — things like that,” Teo said. “The guys that I’ve seen get out, oftentimes they feel alone and they just get homesick. Sometimes, it’s not for everybody, or a coach could mess around and get fired, and now you’re not part of that coach’s plans.”
Ahmed has made visits to the four Pac-12 schools, and plans to visit Notre Dame in September.
The Army All-American Bowl, scheduled for Jan. 7 in San Antonio, Texas, is a big platform for Ahmed. The incoming Juanita senior played in the freshman All-American game, and remembers watching the event as a kid and wondering if he would ever get to play as a senior.
“Me being in the position that I am — highly recruited, and now I’m an All-American — I just look it as not only an opportunity for me, but as an opportunity for kids coming up to set an example for what we can do and how we can be recognized coming out of Washington,” Ahmed said.
He also remembers looking up to older players when he attended camps as a youngster, and striving to be like the players who worked with him during his youth football days. But for Ahmed, youth football was a source of highlight-reel material the likes of which most high school athletes never achieve.
Teo remembers an eighth-grade championship game in which Ahmed scored seven touchdowns and piled up 490 yards — all the while with a cool head and mature demeanor.
“It was unreal,” Teo said, adding that in the time since, Ahmed has shown God-given talent in conjunction with an unstoppable work-ethic.
The invitation to San Antonio is a cherry on top of the football cake.
“I was just in shock for a couple of days, just because it was my childhood dream,” Ahmed said. “I’ve been wanting that for so long and been working so hard to get that, and to finally have it happen is amazing.”
