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Spencer Maxwell puts up 486 yards and six touchdowns on 22 catches and 220 yards and two touchdowns on 25 carries as a senior. (J.J. Smith photo)
Spencer Maxwell puts up 486 yards and six touchdowns on 22 catches and 220 yards and two touchdowns on 25 carries as a senior. (J.J. Smith photo)
MOREHEAD CITY — The idea of Spencer Maxwell playing college football seemed pretty ludicrous during his sophomore season.
The recent West Carteret graduate was a backup wide receiver on the junior varsity.
And now he’s headed to Averett University.
“My whole time on JV, I didn’t touch the game field but maybe once,” Maxwell said. “Our kicker started over me at wide receiver.”
A 6-0, 165-pound speedster with great hands, he shined in a senior season that saw the Patriots win their first league championship in 57 years with a 5-0 record. West went 8-3 overall and won a playoff game for the first time in 10 years.
He averaged 78.4 total yards per game, going for 486 yards and six touchdowns on 22 catches, and putting up 220 yards and two touchdowns on 25 carries.
“Looking at where he’s come from and where he’s at now, it’s incredible,” West coach Daniel Barrow said. “I just finished my 14th season as a coach, and he’s one of the best skill players I’ve ever seen and one of my favorite stories. He was able to put it all together and make himself the best football player and student-athlete that he could.”
He wasn’t only struggling on the football field. Nothing seemed to be going right, and he began to face himself in the mirror.
“I’ve got a 1.8 GPA, I suck at sports, I have to figure something out,” he recalled saying to himself.
The coronavirus pandemic midway through his spring semester provided a reset.
“I was talking to my mom, and it hit me that I’m going to graduate,” Maxwell said. “It’s not forever high school, and I can figure it out later. I have to pick it up now. It clicked really quick.”
He went about resurrecting both his academic and athletic careers.
Maxwell doubled up on classes, taking dual-enrollment classes and honor classes, and did everything he could do to bring up his GPA in the time he had left.
“I got my GPA to a 2.5, which took something considering where it was,” he said. “I learned that you can’t fail if you do the work. If you do the work, you’re going to do OK. I would’ve barely graduated if I kept on the way I was. My GPA probably wouldn’t have even been a 1.0.”
He approached his weightlifting and training with the same fervor.
Barrow reported he’s hardly ever seen a work ethic approaching the one belonging to Maxwell over the past two years.
“I could go out to the school during the summers, or anytime we were out of school, and pick any random time – morning, afternoon, evening – and there is a good chance you would see Spencer,” he said. “He would be out there with the speed ladder on the ground, doing his footwork drills, doing cone drills, over and over and over, by himself, not a soul out there, no coach, nobody. He just wanted it so bad.”
Another West football player, Mason Villeneuve, had made a similar transformation, and Maxwell used him as inspiration. Villeneuve was a senior when Maxwell was a freshman.
“I still talk to him to this day,” Maxwell said.
His hard work paid off.
Barrow kept top-25 lists on the wall of the weight room for students in his weightlifting classes for various training methods like bench press, power clean and the 40-yard dash. Maxwell was 25th with a time of 4.99 seconds in the 40-yard dash as a sophomore. As a junior, he got it down to 4.5.
“I had about 150 kids in my classes, and he goes from No. 25 to top three,” Barrow said. “To knock that much time off in the 40, it was a massive improvement. He really transformed who he was and really turned into a special player.”
As impressive as it was, Maxwell said that it wasn’t his top improvement. When he showed up to West as a freshman, he couldn’t even lift the 45-pound bar for the bench press and didn’t return for another weightlifting summer workout.
He said he decided to get the right mindset, began to get to work, believed in himself and focused on the right thing. He even changed his friends throughout the years and surrounded himself with likeminded people.
“It wasn’t the friend group I have now,” Maxwell said. “I would talk to guys on the football team, but I didn’t really have that connection with them, not like I do now. I still don’t believe my life. Just about every night, I go back and look through my camera roll and see the photos of the lifestyle I was living at that time compared to now, and it is just crazy.”
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