Brett Carlsen/Associated Press
Football and music are Andrew Thomas’s passions, and early on, to the bewilderment of his high school coaches, he practiced both at the same time. An offensive tackle, Thomas would pretend his pads were drums, banging on them while standing on the sideline. Sometimes he would even do it in the huddle as the quarterback called the play.
“After that, the head coach said something to him,” Kevin Johnson, who coached Thomas on the offensive line at Pace Academy in Atlanta, said in an interview. “It kind of woke him up.”
Thomas devoted himself to football, morphing from a 230-pound freshman who could barely bench press half his weight to the highest-rated offensive line recruit in Georgia.