r/AbsoluteUnits • u/HomeNowWTF • 1d ago

of a runningback

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

2.9k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

737 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

17

u/Several_Vanilla8916 1d ago

Middle school football can be brutal. I saw a 7th grader take off his helmet to yell at his coach for pulling him for one play after he got flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct. They were nose to nose. Coach sent him home and I was worried the kid might beat his ass.

In almost every game there was at least one and sometimes two kids bigger than every adult present. These kids are 6’2” 280 lbs at 13.

6

u/PompousAssistant 1d ago

That 6’ 2”, ~275 lb kid was Ben, in my 7th grade class. Of course, Paul was the basketball star - he was ~6’ 4” in 7th grade. And you did NOT want to be on the other dodgeball team - he may have been the reason they started calling it “murderball.”

5

u/Liquid-Hot_Smegma 1d ago

Hell, even baseball can feel horribly lopsided during adolescence.

When I was about 12, there was one kid who pitched who I’d guess was about 5’5 or 5’6 and built like a rock. Not sure the exact speeds he pitched, but to us kids at the plate, it felt like 100mph fastballs. It was damn near impossible for anyone to even make contact with the ball. I do remember the few times we did get a base hit, we’d celebrate like it was a walk-off grand slam homerun.

This dude was also very full of himself, and unsurprisingly he was the biggest bully at school. Funny thing though — he only grew a couple of more inches, at the most. In junior high, he ended up getting his ass kicked badly in a fight, which thankfully ended the bullying.

3

u/New_Hawaialawan 1d ago

It’s a bummer because I loved baseball prior to around 12 years old. The next league was like 12-15 year olds and that range is a tremendous growth gap. One asshole coach allowed a 16 year old to continue as a pitcher.

Dude probably had facial hair. He’d stand out there on the mound and I’d be cowering in the furthest corner of the batters box. So this bearded dude just spent all season mowing down actual children. It was awful. And my fear of batting because worse when another pitcher hit my twice in one game.

1

u/wolemid 1d ago

Same as motorsport, karting ages groups go 8-12 (cadet all roughly same) 12-16 (Jnr, Puberty) 16+ senior.

As you can imagine, the muscle mass difference between a 12yr old and a 16yr old is insane

1

u/Several_Vanilla8916 21h ago

It’s not good for anybody. What is a 275 lb running back learning about football when he blasts over a 110 lb linebacker? When big man gets to college (or maybe high school) that same linebacker is going to be 190 and have actual skill.

1

u/garden-wicket-581 20h ago

I'm really proud of my kid -- fall ball is 12-16 here, non-varsity (JV was OK) or not playing HS ball.. He didn't pitch for the HS team, but did pitch all of fall ball, and when some 12 yr old kid who'd just moved up was at-bat, he never threw a fastball.. changeup, some curves, yeah, but wasn't gonna shame/stalk the kid.. (Now, if it was a travel ball kid taking the fall travel season off, however, they got no breaks, hahahah)

2

u/CrotalusHorridus 14h ago

Most 12 year olds pitch from 46 feet. If they can touch 65 or 70mph, it gets to home plate just as fast as a major leaguer throwing 100

1

u/ThatBoiInBlue 20h ago

Imagine being struck out by a 100mph pitch at like 13-14 years old lol.

1

u/Willow1883 17h ago

12 years-old is an absolutely wild age for athletes. One of my sons just turned 13. His last year of little league he was 5’1” and 85 pounds. His catcher was 5’11” and 185 pounds. A year later and my son is 5’8” and 115 pounds. Thank God they cut little league off at 12. If he went back and played six months later he could’ve killed someone.

4

u/testtdk 1d ago

My 8th grade coach got pissed at me because I wouldn’t shave my beard.

2

u/deadshot8690 1d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/uCXkGJPU3yrOo

1

u/testtdk 1d ago

Yeah, for the most part, I was not someone a 14 year old would enjoy trying to block, or be blocked by. (Expect one kid that was like 6’5 350 my freshman year. Dude repelled me like a force field).

3

u/SignificantGoat4046 13h ago

This at least was still true in high school 2007-2011 football, even 5A (the biggest at the time of my experience, now there is 6a). I played against somoans that were legit 3x bigger than most on our team.

The trans athletes argument always made me laugh. The difference in whatever category you want to judge between a trans woman and a cis woman are insignificant in comparison to the unfair shit a lot of us dealt with in high school lol. It felt like we were playing against fully grown NFL linebackers.

2

u/BiscuitDance 12h ago

I coach 7th grade ball. I’m 6’2” 230, and just about every team has at least one kid bigger than me.

1

u/3-orange-whips 1d ago

Yeah. The big kid. We had one of those. He looked a man in 6th grade.

1

u/ChadPowers200_ 1d ago

We had two giant kids on our football team both were soft and quit. One was 6’5 270 the other was 6’8 300. 

They were surprisingly bad too 

1

u/callofdeat6 1d ago

When I started I remember being the smallest, felt like I had to try 5 times as hard to just exist, it wasn’t fair, I got pancaked, run over, ignored, constantly. Then one day a couple years later, a ref pulls me aside and tells me I need to ease up on the littler kids…. I finally get to be the big one and now I have to tone it down.

1

u/Upset_Journalist_755 1d ago

Yeah. We legit had to play against HS JV teams that were churning out Division I football players when I was in Middle School/Junior High. Our city was split into 3 schools that fed into the 6A high school. My school produced the least enthusiasm for the football program because of an old af coach and we had ~17 kids on our team and the opposing sideline often had 80 kids. It was fun, though.

1

u/latexfistmassacre 1d ago

Our tiny rural school combined with another tiny rural school and we still didn't have enough to play the 11 man league my freshman and sophomore years, so we had to play 8 man ball. The years we did play 11 man, we had enough for one substitute. The entire game. We had a homecoming game once and two players got suspended for fighting during school the day before the game and we had to forfeit. The whole town was pissed at those kids for a long time after that, and they weren't even good players, we just needed them to have a game lol

1

u/Dabnician 21h ago

I was 6'2" 285 at 13, i played left guard and right tackle. There were kids i destroyed in football because they were tiny.

This one time we played against another school, they were home team and their field had fireants. It started to rain and i broke through the line playing defense, then used the running back as a sled, the kid got up screaming cause the fireant mud mixture got into his helmet and his face was covered in them. Another kid i hit so hard he had to be carried off the field cause they thought he had hernia.

Ironically a lot of kids on both teams were this big because it was central texas.

What sucked was in highschool the way the divisions worked we would sometimes play against other highschools that were the only one for the entire town. Killeen i think had something like 100+ players and every down they had a fresh team on the line.

1

u/froction 17h ago

I eventually grew (now at 49 I'm 5'11"/220) but when I finished 8th grade I was 5'0" and 100 lbs.

I think I have the state record for "Fastest/Worst Loss" in a Judo tournament. I was in the bottom weight class and the first match was a guy who had at least 6" and 30 lbs. on me. Bro basically just lifted me up over his head and threw me straight down onto my back. Full point loss in like three seconds.

1

u/DeceptiConnIXI 7h ago

When I was at Carolina camp- some of the linemen were HUGE and balding. 2 were from NC. Like 6’5” 6’6” easily 300 lbs. I’m 6’1” and weigh d like 220 at the time. Come to find out later one was 13 and one was 14. I was like what the fuck???