Trezmen Marshall: The Small Town Kid

ATLANTA - Trezmen Marshall got a strip sack and returned it himself for a touchdown. He then kicked the ball off and got the tackle as a headhunting kicker. Then he lined up at running back and started taking handoffs, all in short order.

On the Clinch County high school football team, you aren’t going to have just one job. You’re going to have several.

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You’ll play in every capacity of the game—Offense, defense, special teams. Players also serve as their own water boy and even their own trainer to an extent. They even ran out carrying their own flags, a duty usually taken by cheerleaders or a spirit squad. In a town of only about 2,500, this is what it has to be. 

No one understands that better than Marshall.

Any position you can think of on the field, Marshall played it at least in some portion. Middle linebacker, outside linebacker, defensive line, running back, quarterback, receiver, kicker even.

“He’s basically had to be the team this season,” said Eric Lutz, one of the radio commentators for Clinch County high school. “He’ll say ‘Hop on my coattail we’re winning this thing.” 

The 2019 prospect probably doesn’t say that exactly, he’s too modest. He’ll just do it. With Clinch down late in the fourth, Marshall was dealing with his third set of cramps. They were trying to score without him so he could rest up for defense, but when a crucial third-and-six came up in the red zone, no one told him to go in. He just stood up from where he was stretching down towards the end of the sideline and walked in. Marshall converted that next play and scored the game-winning touchdown a few plays later. 

That’s the kind of stuff that makes you a local legend of sorts. And he’s had that status for a long time now, since his Pop Warner days really. He was the man-child of the team, stomping all over his half-sized counterparts. It even got to the point where they’d even have to bring his birth certificate to each game to show the referees that he was actually that age. Still though, even after the years of hype, he’s aged better than a child actor. 

“He’s been told how great he was since the eighth grade,” said Marshall’s high school coach Jim Dickerson. “I know if I would have been in the situation my head would have been bigger, I wouldn’t have been able to manage it. And we’ve had kids fall into that trap.”

UGA Commit Trezman Marshall Shines: Photo Gallery

Except it wasn’t always that way. That trap almost consumed Marshall in his early years, all the way back in elementary school. Marshall stayed back a year in the third grade. Because of that, he was too old to play football and said that he “wasn’t planning on playing again” because of it. 

Clearly, things have since changed. When he finished fifth grade, Marshall took summer classes and was able to skip the sixth grade to get back to his age group. Most middle schoolers can’t see more than a week ahead in their lives. Marshall though was able to look far ahead and wasn’t a fan of what he saw.

Most of that duty of shaping up his life fell on him. But the Clinch County community was there to help him along the way. Lutz was one of those people who helped out quite a bit. He would help feed Marshall and his teammates throughout high school and give them a place to hang out. Lutz would also make the four-hour trip from Homerville to Athens when Marshall wanted to visit Georgia. Sure, Lutz didn’t need to help out. To him though, it was almost his job.

“It takes a community to raise a kid like that,” Lutz said about Marshall.

And that feeling of communal love is something that Marshall found at UGA, too. It’s what separated Georgia from its competitors, and he’s quick to say that.

“At other schools, I only got friendship and family with one person,” Marshall said. “But with Georgia, I know everybody and they all know me.”

And even though the Georgia commit has his ears open to other schools, he’s got one main focus—This year. For the first bit of the season, Marshall said he wasn’t really even talking to coaches are schools. 

“I need to be focused on the game,” Marshall said. “I’m not going to be talking to coaches getting mixed in with all that.”

He’s talking to coaches now, but it goes to show you the kind of player Marshall is. He doesn’t care where he plays, what kind of numbers he has or the the accolades he garners. He wants to win and doesn’t care how it happens, a mindset that will help him fit right in with Kirby Smart and UGA when he steps on campus this January.