ST. LOUIS — Cardinal Ritter assistant football coach Sean Morris doesn’t call senior Jamarion Parker a running back.
“I call him a racing back because it looks like he’s always racing,” Morris said.
Parker, a Nebraska football commit, has next-level speed and flashes it every time he touches the ball.
“I don’t know what he runs in 40 (yard dash), but anytime I see him in open field, I know he’s gone,” Cardinal Ritter senior receiver Dejerrian Miller said.
Miller admits that as quick as he is, Parker has the edge.
Add lightning-quick speed to Parker’s vision, power and patience and you have the engine in the backfield that powered Cardinal Ritter to its second consecutive undefeated state championship last season.
“God has blessed him with an unbelievable skill set,” Cardinal Ritter coach Brennan Spain said. “Things people work so hard on just come to him naturally.”
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Parker received scholarship offers from nearly every major football program in the nation. He verbally committed to Nebraska early in the summer.
“They showed that they were the most interested in me and meeting my family,” Parker said. “They got to know everything about me and were recruiting me not just for football but for outside of the football field. They are trying to set me up for a better life. The coaching staff was amazing, from the head coach down.”
Parker flashed his elite speed every time he touched the ball as a junior.
He rolled up 1,644 yards on the ground on just 147 carries for a video-game stat of 11.2 yards per carry. He also scored 22 times on the ground before adding 267 receiving yards with an average of 16.7 yards per reception.
“When he gets the ball, he’s racing,” Morris said.
All of it helped the Lions to their second successive state championship.
Ritter beat Republic 38-25 in the Class 5 title game, which Parker said meant a little extra.
“You don’t really get too many back-to-back state championships,” Parker said. “For it to be back to back as being able to start a legacy means a lot.”
The 6-foot back’s football career got off to a quick start.
“I realized that when I started touching the football when I was about 5 or 6 years old,” Parker said. “When I got on the team, and I scored about five, six touchdowns in every game. If I saw people on one side of the field, I’d reverse to the other side.”
Though he likens his game to that of 2013 St. Louis Rams draft pick Tavon Austin, he can also bulldoze and batter his way through defenders.
Helias Catholic defenders found out the hard way that he’s more than just a scatback when he plowed over a defender instead of running out of bounds.
“I’m not gonna just give you the tackle, I mean, so you’ve got to work for it,” Parker said. “People may think I’m going to run out of bounds, but I’ll always bring it.”
Going against multiple Division I recruits in practice helps sharpen Parker’s game. He doesn’t ask for them to make it easier on himself or them.
“I mean, nobody is going to make it easy on us, so I expect their best because that’s what I’m going to give them,” Parker said.
The expectation is to help carry the Lions to a third state title in as many years.
But while the Lions are gunning for that goal, Spain also has noticed his senior leaders taking the underclassmen under their wings.
Particularly, Parker has spent time teaching the young running back core.
“People gravitate to him because he’s a natural leader,” Spain said. “He was a freshman at one point; he understands the questions of what it’s like to be like them.”
Whatever records Parker may set before he jets off to Nebraska, he wants to see the next group of players to break them. He’s coaching them to do just that.
“I want them to do better than me — everything I’m doing, I’m teaching them to try to do better,” Parker said. “Whatever I do, they should try to be better than that.”
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