![]() Levis moved on to Xavier High School in Middletown, was the second-team quarterback on the 2017 New Haven Register All-State Team, then went to Penn State before the jump to Kentucky, and he should be playing on fall Sundays before long.īut it sounds as if he shone at a school without a football team first. Skills aside, we think he’s got the fortitude, the motivation to be a very good NFL quarterback. “I don’t know if they still do that, but if they did, this kid, he’d get 100 or whatever that score would be,” Wallack said. Walla]ck said he talked with other coaches about the idea of Levis taking the Wonderlic test, similar to an IQ test that was famous as an NFL evaluation tool for draft prospects. He showed me a maturity beyond his years early on. “When others could fall off the rails and be typically eighth-grade silly, he focused on maintaining appropriate comportment,” Fixx said, pausing to get that last word. He was popular with his other students, Fixx said, but had something more, was able to plan ahead. Wallack remembered Levis as a pretty good lacrosse player as well.Īll three described a magnetic personality that helped make Levis a leader. the B-team thing, I think it worked out.” ![]() “We were a school where the whole team might not score 43 points in a game,” Wallack said. “He can take out some of his frustrations at being cut.”Ī few weeks later, in the first game of the school season, Wallack said, Levis scored 43 points. ![]() “And hey, he’s also going to play Country School basketball,” Wallack said. He said he told them that they had a motivated youngster and a little adversity might make him stronger. Wallack remembered meeting with Levis’ parents after Will was cut from Madison’s top travel basketball team to the B-team. That was my first notion that this kid had something a little different.” “We were losing to a team in basketball by about 16 points at halftime,” Wainio said, “and Will came out in the second half and scored 32 points, in a middle school basketball game. And none of that took away from his poise or tenacity. Wainio said that Levis was the kind of guy who always had a smile, who had a big laugh. You’ve got to have the ability to delay gratification.” “The drive that took, playing football and taking an overload of courses and summer work. “He accelerated his studies at Penn State in order to be able essentially to graduate, go to the University of Kentucky and not have to sit out,” Fixx said. Will really combined talent and hard work.”įixx recalled meeting up with Levis in Lexington, soon after the quarterback had transferred from Penn State with a degree, which to Fixx exemplified Levis’ work ethic. It’s not so unusual for us, having high-achievers in drama, athletics, the arts. “He was obviously interested in football, but a lot of young kids think they’re going to go professional in football, basketball, soccer, tennis. “We knew when he was here he was going to take a leadership position,” Fixx said. John Fixx, now head of school, arrived at the Country School in 2013 so was only around Levis for one year. I remember having to tell him, hey, when you’re throwing to the fifth graders, you’ve got to throw a little slower.” “A private school, there were parents who probably wouldn’t have let their kids play football, with concussions or whatever, doctors. He threw so hard – not purposefully – so hard, he knocked down some kids. The first few times we went out with Will, everybody wanted to throw the football around. “We had fifth and eighth graders together. “At recess, we allowed the kids to play football,” said Chris Wallack, the school’s former athletic director, who’d sometimes be the teacher out at recess. In talking with a couple of people who knew Levis as a young teen, they describe a middle schooler who was already a leader with preternatural poise. “I was taken aback by that,” Wainio said this week. “Gratias ago tibi pro auxilio!” Levis wrote, adding “I hope that is right” in parentheses.
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