The nation's top tight end recruit, Arik Gilbert, has been named the 2020 Gatorade high school male athlete of the year.
After school one day when he was in sixth grade, Arik Gilbert walked into the classroom where his mother, Akiba, taught computer science and web design at Maynard Holbrook Jackson High in Atlanta. At the time Arik considered himself a basketball player: He was already nearly six feet tall and played for a handful of travel teams. Besides, hoops was in his genes. Akiba had been a forward at UNC Charlotte and coached a number of his youth teams.
Arik hadn’t played organized football in a few years—but as he watched a rec team practicing through the school window, his mom could tell the sport was calling to him. “Arik,” Akiba said, “don’t you go out there and go on that team.”
He couldn’t resist. Arik ran out to join the kids doing their best Randy Moss impressions, and it didn’t take long for him to stand out. A half-hour later he went back upstairs: “Mom, the coaches want me to play for them. They want to talk to you.”
“Arik,” his mom shot back.
“What? I didn’t do nothing!”
Arik is now 6' 5", 253 pounds and an 18-year-old who just finished his senior year at Marietta (Ga.) High, but one thing hasn’t changed: When he walks onto a football field, people notice. Last season Gilbert was the best high school tight end in the country: He was No. 12 on ESPN’s Class of 2020 overall prospect list and was named to the SI All-American team. He’ll be joining the high-powered LSU offense this fall. But before he started his college career, one more accolade came his way this summer: He was named the Gatorade Male High School Athlete of the Year.
Gilbert’s physical gifts are obvious: He’s already a polished route runner and he dazzles scouts with unusual body control for a player his size. But his rise as a football player and as a leader has also been driven by his calm demeanor and steady temperament. “He’s just different,” explains John Towler, a longtime Georgia-based youth football coach and one of Gilbert’s mentors. “There are just a handful of people in the world like him.”
Gilbert was initially a running back. He played for the DeKalb County Trojans in the second grade, and his parents remember him plodding through the middle of defenses as opposing players latched on to their son’s arms, legs and back. His size—he was 10 pounds, 11 ounces, at birth and was always bigger than his peers—gave him a clear advantage. “He wasn’t really running fast,” his father, Avis Sr., says. “But he wasn’t going down.”
When Gilbert was nearly three, his parents divorced. He spent most of his time living with his mother; older brother, Avis Jr.; and younger sister, Amila. In 2006, almost a decade after enrolling at UNC Charlotte, Akiba finished her bachelor’s degree at Georgia College & State University, while working a full-time job and also caring for her children.
Akiba wanted to get her sons involved in sports, but she faced serious financial constraints. Gilbert stopped playing football for the most part after second grade; in its place, Akiba sought out basketball leagues where she could coach, thus allowing her boys to play for free. What Gilbert lacked in grace on the court—he spent a lot of time on the floor after tripping over his own feet—he made up for in energy and physicality. “It was really just about them being competitive,” she says. “And Arik has a motor that just won’t stop.”
So it should be no surprise that Gilbert fell back in love with football on that sixth-grade afternoon. A few years later, at a preseason tournament in the summer before eighth grade, he met Towler, a scout for a youth development program called Football University. By then Gilbert was 6' 3" and a wide receiver and defensive lineman for the Atlanta Vikings; he got his spot on the team after Akiba offered to create the Vikings’ website in exchange for waiving the participation fee.
The jamboree was played on a “flattened cow pasture that somebody drew the lines on,” Towler recalls, with 20-minute, running-clock games played all day. In one of those mini games Gilbert had two sacks and three quarterback hurries, and caught two touchdowns. “He immediately jumped out at you,” Towler says. “He was very raw, but he was different athletically.”
Towler befriended the Gilbert family and became a football adviser for Arik. Over the years he shuttled Arik to camps and took him on college recruiting visits. Towler told him that he’d be held to a higher standard than his peers because of his football ability and warned him to be careful about who he let into his inner circle. “Arik took all that to heart,” Towler says. “He had to grow up faster than most.”
At those camps, talent evaluators were struck by his size, leaping ability and drive. By the time he entered ninth grade he had already received scholarship offers from Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee, among other schools. He spent his freshman year at Woodward Academy, a private school in the Atlanta area. But when Akiba got a job teaching in the digital lab at Marietta High, Arik transferred there.
His mom says the move “took Arik out of his comfort zone,” but if he was uneasy it didn’t show on the field. As a sophomore he played defensive end and tight end, with 570 receiving yards and six sacks. He also started workouts with Terrence Edwards, a wide receivers coach at Football University who while at Georgia had broken the SEC record for total receiving yards. “He was the one who got me right,” Gilbert says. The work paid off: As a junior he totaled more than 1,200 receiving yards and caught 14 touchdowns, dominating opponents with a combination of size and athleticism. “He’d come down with the ball like Charles Barkley would on a rebound,” Towler says.
Marietta struggled to a 6–7 record that year, but in Gilbert’s final high school season the Blue Devils rebounded. They went 14–2 and won Georgia’s 7A state championship. Gilbert had 1,860 receiving yards and 15 touchdowns. “There are really only three people that I can compare him to on an athlete basis, and that’s Vernon Davis, Travis Kelce and Rob Gronkowski,” Towler says. “All amazingly talented and athletically gifted.”
The day after their state final victory, Gilbert and a number of teammates went to a birthday party for a local sixth-grade student, a ballboy for the Blue Devils. The boy’s mother had asked Gilbert to come weeks earlier, before anyone knew he and his team would be celebrating a championship that day. Gilbert played quarterback in the front-yard pickup game. Afterward, he signed cleats, footballs and calendars. It’s one example of why, throughout his time in Marietta, he has become as well known for his community impact as for his athletic abilities. One more: On game days during the season, Gilbert and other Blue Devils visited local schools to build community and fan excitement.
Coach Richard Morgan says Gilbert was always a kid magnet. Akiba says that parents frequently came up to her, impressed at how generously her son gave of his time.
At the start of his senior year, Gilbert founded his school’s chapter of Whisper, an initiative to encourage inclusion, diversity and technology-free conversations among students. He says he started the group after seeing peers who were left out of social situations and because he knew firsthand how it felt to be isolated—whether it was as a young kid who was always bigger than everyone else, or as a high school sophomore starting a new school in a new town. “It was a blessing to see him take his own personal struggles of acceptance and use it within his community,” Akiba says.
“I don’t want to be just an athlete,” Gilbert says. Now he’s learning how he can make an impact in Baton Rouge; he enrolled at LSU this spring and is preparing for a college football season that he hopes will happen in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic. He’s already made a good impression. This summer Tigers coach Ed Orgeron said fans should be “excited to see [Gilbert] play.” It might be this fall, or it might not be until 2021. Either way, Gilbert will be prepared.
“I feel like I still got a lot of stuff to do,” he says. “But I never take my focus off my goals.”