Bishop Canevin Athlete: Zach Trusky

Bishop Canevin High School is a very small school. Each graduating class probably has somewhere between 60-70 students which is pretty small. But we all have to remember too that Bishop Canevin (aka BC) is a private Roman Catholic Diocese school meaning it is not a public school. However at the small school of Bishop Canevin they have a running back that made some noise this football season and his name is Zach Trusky.

Trusky is a senior at BC and he won the KDKA Extra Effort Award in the middle of March as he was recognized for the athletic ability he has in football, the grades he gets in school and the community service he has done during his time in high school.

The way that this man has approved statistically from his sophomore to his senior year has been tremendous. During his sophomore year, which was the 2015 football season, he rushed the ball 24 times for 164 yards and scored 1 touchdown. During his junior year, which was the 2016 football season, he rushed the ball 76 times for 414 yards and scored 4 touchdowns. And now during his senior year, which was this past football season he rushed the ball 199 times for 1,020 yards and scored 16 touchdowns. If you have noticed his touchdown stats you can see that each year he has scored 4 times as more touchdowns than he did the year before.

Trusky has a 4.65 GPA who has currently done at least 33 hours of community service and he told KDKA's Bob Pompeani that him getting good grades leads him to playing fantastic as he gets onto the football field. Trusky also lead the Crusaders with interceptions this season as he plays outside linebacker on defesne. So you can see that he controls both sides of the ball for the Crusaders. When you watch him as a running back you can see by the way he plays how much he wants to succeed. The way that he slips away from defenders is pretty crazy. The man fights for every yard he can get and will not be taken down until he has no choice and that's why the Crusaders football coach Chris Lucas loves Trusky so much as he calls Trusky "A natural born leader."

The funny thing about Trusky is that all of us might have ever known how much he has improved from the season before if Maleik Hemingway did not transfer schools. You see Hemingway was the former Crusader running back and he transferred to Perry, a city school in Pittsburgh, before entering his senior year this school year. Hemingway was a monster his junior year which was last year as he rushed the ball 158 times and ran for 1,495 yards. If Hemingway stayed at BC this year for his senior year he would have been the team's starting running back and we would have not seen Trusky play that much.

When I watched Trusky on TV when he won the Extra Effort award I thought of him as a nice looking man who seems very focused on school and you would not think by looking at him he would destroy all those defenders by rushing the ball and give them nightmares. But it turns out underneath Trusky their is a warrior who will do whatever it takes to win. And I mean anything to win.

Trusky is only 5 feet 8 inches which people might say is short for a running back and probably a lot of people have told him that he seems too short and maybe that was his motivation to prove to all those people that he can do whatever he wants on the football field no matter the size. Perhaps Trusky did so good this year because he felt he had to fill Hemingway's shoes. But who knows.

On April 22nd Trusky announced on Twitter that he will continue his academic and football career at Grove City College which is an NCAA D3 athletic school. I believe that Trusky will continue to have success playing football at Grove City because of his determination to always play like it is his last game of football he will ever play.