Echos and Whispers
It starts quiet.
It always starts quiet.
Before the lights. Before the crowd. Before the first hit that shakes the stands, there's a silence. A stillness sitting heavy over everything, waiting for someone to break it.
And when something finally does, it breaks in one of two ways.
A whisper.
Or an echo.
They begin the same. Low. Quiet. Personal. A single voice barely rising above nothing. At the start, you couldn't tell them apart.
But they are not the same.
A whisper is a secret. It's meant to stay small. It leans in close, hand cupped to your ear, because it's saying something the world isn't supposed to hear. A whisper hides. It stays between the few who were meant to know. And when it's done, it's gone, like it was never there at all.
An echo refuses to stay small.
An echo is what happens when something is too big to hold. It doesn't lean in, it breaks out. It climbs. It spreads. It rolls off the walls and into the open air until it belongs to everyone. A whisper is kept. An echo is set loose.
A whisper protects the silence it came from.
An echo shatters it.
Here's the trouble with this offseason. Almost everything you've heard has been a whisper.
BHP has a new head coach. Coach Crane arrives from Seneca to take over a program coming off back-to-back state championship appearances, which is a strange kind of inheritance. Add a new region from this round of SCHSL realignment, one of the tougher schedules BHP has lined up maybe ever, and a transfer that stings more than the others, and you have the most eventful summer a lot of us can remember.
All of it real. All of it worth saying once. But that's what a whisper is, the small secret thing traded ear to ear, the story someone else wants you carrying, and, like the note says above, gone when it's done like it was never there. What I'd rather do with the next few hundred words is turn up the other sound. Because there's an echo under all of this, and it's building throughout this program.
An echo starts low. This one starts up front.
Think of the roar at Augusta. The crowd erupts in the pines, and somewhere down a fairway a player who hasn't taken his shot yet hears it. He knows. The pressure just found him.
The front seven is where an opponent hears the noise before they've snapped the ball.
Ty Dubose and Kamarion Glenn aren't just the two best players on BHP's defense. They're two of the best in South Carolina, and they play the two spots that let a defense survive losing starters everywhere else.
Dubose led the team in nearly every defensive category last season as a junior. He's already holding college scholarship offers, and he hasn't taken a snap as a senior yet. BHP has produced a long line of great linebackers, and Dubose belongs in that lineage, but what separates him is the physical package. The instincts and the tackling are there, and so is a level of raw ability the recent names didn't all have at his level. He leads this group, and he'll need to, because there's a lot of new around him.
Glenn is the one I've been talking about for years, usually in the same breath as Kylan Dixon. Dixon graduated. The line is Glenn's now, a handoff and not a downgrade. What makes him unusual is where he's disruptive. Plenty of linemen cause problems in the pass game. Glenn's gift is against the run, penetrating and blowing up plays before they develop, more physical than most high-school interior linemen can manage. Go back through his tape, or watch him at the spring game and through summer work, and there are stretches where nobody across from him has an answer.
The rest of the seven will have new faces. Contributors graduated, jobs are open. But two anchors this good give a defense a floor most teams don't have. That's the low, steady sound the whole thing builds off of.
Some echoes carry what came before
Some echoes carry what came before. What others expect. A looming weight of the inevitable, because everyone remembers how it went last time.
The tight end and the backfield are that kind of echo, the one that sounds like BHP the way you already know it.
Nick Sargent at tight end might be the best in the state, and I don't think that's a stretch. As a sophomore last season he became one of the most dominant run blockers you'll find at the position, and flashed enough catching the ball to hint at more. With another offseason behind him and an offense built to feature him, I'd expect him to push for the team lead in receptions and receiving yards. The size is obvious. What makes him more than a big target is the athleticism under it, the route running, the hands in traffic. Add the competitive streak and it's easy to see why major programs are calling, with more to come.
The backfield returns two backs who carry a load when it lands on them. Cam Robinson was the third-leading rusher last season, going for 397 yards and 3 touchdowns at 6.51 a carry. He and Tizere Ware were the change-of-pace pair behind starter MJ Earl, but the games that matter for projecting this season are the ones where Earl was banged up. Against Laurens, Robinson took 9 carries for 91 yards and 2 touchdowns. Against Greer, Ware went 9 for 70 with Earl limited. Small samples, but the shape of them holds: when the workload showed up, both answered it.
Two things make their fall easier. One is a quarterback who can run, which we'll get to. The other is the lead blocking of H-back Brody Riddle, the piece that never fills a stat sheet but shows up on every important run you'll cheer for.
But some echoes are a warning
But some echoes are a warning. Something is building. Something unexpected. Something that hasn't shown its face yet, but is already on the move.
That's the quarterback room. And here's where I'm looking in from the outside with no inside knowledge, same as you.
Coming out of last season and through spring, I'd have told you Malachi Bohler was the pick to take over the most important job on the field, and it wasn't close in my head. Look at the limited touches last year. He talled 7.29 yards a carry on 14 rushes, 13 yards an attempt through the air with 2 touchdowns on just 8 throws, 23.5 yards a punt return, and, on defense, second on the team with 3 interceptions and one returned for a score. A player who makes a defense account for all eleven bodies and every blade of grass.
But we're a few weeks from the first game, and the picture has shifted. Based on comments Coach Crane made to WYFF's Julia Morris, the lean appears to be toward an even younger option, freshman Rylan Crooks. A freshman stepping into command of this offense tells you something about how far along it already is, and about a kid advanced enough to be handed it. The video on Crooks is limited, but what's out there fits what this offense wants: mobile, accurate on the move, able to get the ball to everybody.
And if that is the move, it carries a second gift that has nothing to do with Crooks. If he's the answer at quarterback, Bohler gets to focus on the side of the ball where his ceiling might be higher. A defense replacing this much would love to build around a player like him in the secondary. Around here, Bohler's trajectory on defense points the same way Tajah Watson-Martin's and Marquise Henderson's did when they broke in early.
That's the version that gets me excited for this defense. Dubose in the middle, Glenn up front, Bohler in the back end, a game-changer at every level. And we all know what a defensive mind like coordinator Coach Jennings can do handed talent like that.
And when the echoes get loudest
We've walked through a few of the groups and names I can't wait to see. There will be more. There always are. Last year it was Dubose and Bohler stepping into a light nobody had them under the year before. Somebody does that every season at BHP. Next week we'll try to guess at who's next, in the annual 5 Questions post.
So here's where the whisper and the echo finally split for good. The change is the whisper, the easy story handed to you everywhere this summer, already halfway to gone. The team taking shape is the echo: the front seven, the spine of the offense, the game-changer waiting in the secondary, the planning you're only starting to hear rumblings about. It's been building all summer, and it climbs a little every day we count down to that first August Friday Night.
And when the echoes get loudest, they step aside. They quiet down. And they let them Big Bad Bears walk out and show you exactly why the noise was growing.