Senior Tackle: Cade Stover on how Penn State, Ohio State recruited him

Ohio State commitment Cade Stover is set to embark on his final season of high school football and basketball at Lexington (Ohio) High School. Lexington, a small town of just about 4,700 people near Mansfield, is a farm community that’s played an instrumental role in raising Stover, the country’s eighth-ranked outside linebacker. He committed to the Buckeyes in late April this year, picking Ohio State over Penn State, Notre Dame and 20 other schools. The 6-foot-4, 230-pound athlete is on the verge of becoming his school’s all-time leading scorer in basketball, and he will share all of the ups and downs of his senior year with Lettermen Row in this weekly journal.

Last week we lost another game and our record dropped to 1-4.

This is nowhere close to where we wanted to be at this point in the season, and it’s disappointing. That being said, we are going to squeeze and grab onto every bit of positive football we can get out of it from here. The mental state when you’re 1-4 is what is the toughest, honestly. But we have a group of guys around us that are really great.

It’s not easy, but we all stay positive and show up every day and give everything we have. That’s all anyone could ever ask for on a team. The wins will come from that.

Cade Stover considered Penn State. (Cade Stover/Courtesy)

As I’m sure everyone reading this knows, the Buckeyes take on Penn State this weekend. This is a huge game for both teams in the Big Ten and for the conference in general. After the great showing last week against Tulane, the Buckeyes are going to be juiced up and ready to roll in Happy Valley.

Ironically, Penn State was one of the schools I visited and considered during the recruiting process. It was a great campus, beautiful and out in the country, which is right up my alley. I didn’t feel the love and passion there I did at Ohio State, but most of all I didn’t feel the comfort that I felt at Ohio State. The Buckeyes staff made me feel like I was a part of the program from the first time I stepped on campus.

Sure, growing up in Ohio, it’s very hard to have the best college football program in the country in your backyard and not go there. But the Ohio State coaches never treated me like I wasn’t family. That’s really why I picked them more than anything.

Since this weekend was rainy, it was kind of uneventful. That said, there’s not a lot of farm life for me to share, so instead I’ll tell you a little bit of why I do what I do.

My family has always been a football family. My dad and his three brothers all played football. My dad played for Bowling Green. Each of this brothers played college football, too. One at Dayton, another at Bowling Green also and one at Ohio University. Growing up, I had football minds all around me, and I fell in love with the game, competing, all of that. I love the farm, I love working on the farm and one day I want to own a farm and just work on it with my dad for the rest of my life. But my first goal? To reach the NFL, of course.

That’s another reason why Ohio State was the right choice for me.

I’m pretty excited that my best friend Kyle Johnston will hopefully be coming to Ohio State with me to run track and cross country, as long as everything goes as planned. I met Kyle and have grown up with him since fourth grade. Like me, he also wants to be a farmer. But he comes from the what I call the city part of Lexington.

From the first time he came to our farm you could tell he had a passion for it, even if at that point he didn’t know much about it. Ever since then, Kyle has been over to the farm and has done everything that I would do. He has learned a lot of what I have learned, too. He wants to have a hog farm one day, so it’d be great to have that tie with our family’s cattle farm.

I hope one day, when I’m older and football is over, to farm with Kyle and my dad right back where it all started in Lexington, Ohio. That’d be a pretty awesome life.

Talk to you guys all next week. Thanks for reading again.