Calvert Hall OT Ben Curtis has options
For three weeks, Cardinal Gibbons junior Ben Curtis joined his classmates in protesting the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s decision to close the venerable Catholic school, while simultaneously searching for a place to spend his senior year.
When it became clear that Curtis and his fellow Crusaders couldn’t save their school, the 6-foot-5, 265-pound offensive tackle zeroed in on a new destination with a familiar face in charge of the football program.
“I narrowed it down to Gilman, Good Counsel and Calvert Hall, and then I just chose Calvert Hall because I felt like it was the best fit,” said Curtis, the sixth-ranked senior lineman in the state according to MDHigh.com. “It has the same air of brotherhood that Gibbons had when I was there. And I also knew some of the players, and I knew Coach [Donald] Davis prior to this because he was recruiting me to play for Gibbons in middle school.”
Davis, who took the Calvert Hall job four years ago, didn’t have contact on a personal level with Curtis back then, but he remembered his potential well.
“I’ll tell you what, it was totally, totally different when he was a young kid,” Curtis said. “First of all, he was very raw out of Howard County. He was just a big kid, really just learning how to play football. And early on, even as I observed him at Gibbons, a lot of people weren’t sure whether he was a basketball player or a football player. Was he a basketball kid trying to play football, or was he a football kid who can play basketball? But he’s a football kid, hard-nosed with a great attitude.”
Curtis’ move to MIAA A Conference competition will be monitored closely by several college football coaches. He spent the summer attending camps – including stops at Connecticut, Duke, James Madison, Maryland and North Carolina. Curtis has picked up scholarship offers from JMU and Bryant. The Blue Devils offered but shortly thereafter received three offensive line commitments, putting Curtis’ recruitment in a holding pattern.
“It feels amazing,” Curtis said of having scholarship offers. “A few schools are talking about offering sometime this fall. I’ve talked to other schools like Rutgers and UConn that want to see how I do in the first few games of the season. … There’s a little pressure, but I believe I’ll do as well as I did at Gibbons.”
Davis said UConn has Curtis “high on their radar,” while the Terps coaches are also watching him closely. There’s “not a doubt” in the Cardinals coach’s mind that Curtis is a future Division I player.
“One of the things I like about him is he’s just coming in and continuing to improve because he’s still very young,” Davis said. “He’s not a kid that’s been playing forever. These kids today are playing when they’re five, six years old. He didn’t start playing until the 7th grade, and he didn’t become an offensive lineman until high school. He’s really a kid that’s only had three years at his position. In that time, he has become an elite kid. His ability has almost outpaced his fundamentals. But I told him to just keep working everyday to be the best you can.”
Transferring into a well-established program as a senior is never easy, but Davis and Curtis agree that so far, his move has been seamless. While the circumstances that led Curtis to Calvert Hall weren’t ideal, he’s settling in nicely to his new surroundings.
“Seeing the team now, it looks like we can make a pretty good run for the [MIAA A Conference] championship,” Curtis said. “So that’s what I’m excited for.”
