More and more, football coaches at every level – from Pop Warner all the way up to the NFL – have continued the trend of putting the best athlete on the team at the quarterback position.
This coming season, one of the top athletes in the state of Washington will be under center for Newport High School in Bellevue, not traditionally a hotbed for football scouts to congregate, and his name is is Isaac Dotson.
“I feel like I’m a quarterback who is a good athlete rather than the other way around,” Dotson told NEI recently. “I’m a good athlete and I can make plays with my legs, but I prefer to sit back and make plays with my arm and that’s what I really tried to do this year.”
Dotson, along with the rest of the Knights, played with a heavy heart after his offensive coordinator, Tim Driver, died suddenly early in the season.
“It was tough to recover from, but he would expect us to go out and play our hearts out and we went out and did that,” Dotson said. “The upper classmen held the team together and we rallied around each other and we finished off the season playing pretty well even though we didn’t make the playoffs.”
As a sophomore, Dotson rushed for 1,100 yards and passed for 800 yards while combining for 25 touchdowns on the season (16 rushing, nine passing) and led his team to 6-5 record. This past season the talented athlete reversed those number, throwing for over 1,000 yards and rushing for 800 while accounting for 23 touchdowns (10 passing, 13 rushing).
“I really worked hard on my footwork and just keeping my eyes down the field and allowing my receivers to get open,” Dotson said. “This offseason I’m going to work a lot at the Barton Football Camps and I want to hit the Nike Combine at Washington and probably a couple of team camps this summer.
“I’m playing basketball for my team right now, but I’m going to have to skip a game so I can go down to the US Army All-American Combine (on January 6th) in San Antonio,” Dotson said. “I’m looking forward to competing against the best on the field and seeing where I fit into things. It should be a great time.”
On the recruiting front, Dotson doesn’t have an offer at this point, but he’s getting heavy interest from schools like Washington, Washington State, Oregon State, Oregon, Stanford and UCLA.
“I’ve been over to Wazzu three times and I like it over there,” Dotson said. “With the new staff, it will be interesting to see how things go, but I really like the school and the program.
“At U-Dub, coach (Jeff) Mills said the coaches there like me a lot, but it’s more as an athlete and not as a quarterback and the other schools like me as an athlete as well.”
NEI will have more from Dotson in the coming weeks and months as he begins the recruiting process in earnest.
http://www.hudl.com/athlete/516672/isaac-dotson Isaac Dotson Highlights
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubBz-a3ZCN8 Isaac Dotson Interview
