Myles Norwood Resumes With AAU Junior Olympic Games

BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. - Negotiate with Myles Norwood at your own risk.

It cost his dad a car.

A senior cornerback for the Trinity High football team, Norwood spent an inordinate amount of his childhood at track practice. His father, Glen, is the Trinity track coach after stops at several area high schools and spends his offseason running the Ultimate Speed Academy club track program.

Norwood, 17, runs for the program, but when his father asked him to consider competing in the decathlon at the AAU Junior Olympics last summer, he balked.

“I didn’t even want to do it,” Norwood said. “We had to make a deal for me to do it.”

The deal was if Norwood scored more than 5,000 points and won the national championship in his 15-16-year-old age group, he would receive a car for his troubles.

And what exactly would those troubles look like?

The decathlon includes the 100-meter dash, long jump, high jump, 400-meter run, 110-meter hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin and finishes with a 1,500-meter run. The competitors earn points for where they finish in each event and when all 10 events are through whoever has the most total points wins.

At first, Norwood had no interest because the pole vault looked crazy and running a 1,500, well that’s just plain crazy.

Yet the promise of a car was too much to pass up. Norwood agreed, overcame his trepidation with the pole vault and won his first national championship in the decathlon with 5,447 points. For good measure, he also won his age group’s national championship in the long jump (21 feet, 11.25 inches), took third in the high jump, fourth in the triple jump and was eighth in the javelin.

Norwood also set the Trinity pole vault school record when he cleared 9 feet, 6 inches.

But a chest full of medals and a car weren’t the only benefits of his deal. Norwood’s success made college football coaches sit up and take notice of him.

Number 19 on the Post-Dispatch Super 30 countdown of the area’s top high school seniors, Norwood’s overall athletic success padded his prospect resume.

“(College coaches) love that I run track, that I’m an athlete,” Norwood said. “That’s what got me a lot of these offers.”

At 6-foot-2 and 171 pounds, Norwood has an excellent frame for a cornerback. He’s also pretty good at what he does which means his highlight tape is a bit dry. He finished his junior season, his first with significant varsity playing time, with 17 tackles and nary an interception. That’s due in large part to the fact opposing quarterbacks refused to throw the ball anywhere near him.

“I was targeted something like seven times all season,” Norwood said. “I would try to bait quarterbacks so much and they still wouldn’t throw it. Most of my highlights are me checking the receiver.”

Had the coronavirus pandemic not shaken up the world as we know it in March, Norwood would have had the opportunity to compete in the offseason at scouting combines, college camps and show what he can do when the ball is thrown his way.

Instead he joined the rest of the Class of 2021 in trying to figure out a recruiting process that involves phone calls, Zoom meetings and virtual visits to college campuses as in-person recruiting has been shut down for the better part of five months.

There was a time when Norwood didn’t know if he’d have a reason to take an official visit. He didn’t land his first offer until March when Bucknell broke the ice. Norwood was so pumped he could hardly contain himself.

“I can’t even explain it, all the hard work was paying off finally,” he said. “After the first one, I was ready to commit.”

It’s a good thing he didn’t. Within a day of posting his Bucknell offer on social media, Norwood had another seven offers to consider. He went from nothing to being buried in an avalanche of opportunities.

“It was crazy,” he said. “After my ninth offer I was like, ‘I need to sit back and they’ll keep coming.’”

 They have.

Norwood now counts 18 offers including Air Force, Army, Austin Peay, Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Brown, Eastern Illinois, Eastern Michigan, Fordham, Holy Cross, Missouri State, Navy, Northern Illinois, Southeast Missouri State and Youngstown State.

Making things more intriguing is several Power 5 programs have taken an interest in him and are communicating regularly. Iowa, Iowa State, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech and Washington State have Norwood on their radar. They’ve told him they’d like to see film of his first three games this season to help their evaluation. It’s made Norwood’s choice a little harder as this season may or may not happen as the nation continues to slog through the pandemic.

“I’m praying,” Norwood said.

Regardless of whether he gets on the field in the fall, winter or spring, Norwood knows he’ll be playing somewhere on Saturdays.

And that’s nonnegotiable.