The oral history of Chase Claypool's remarkable high school career

Robert Stevenson spent 20 minutes recalling the night Chase Claypool scored six touchdowns to beat his two-time defending British Columbia provincial champion in a 2015 playoff game. The veteran coach evoked images of buzzsaws, lawnmowers and Soviet anti-aircraft. 

But he best described the helplessness in guarding the 6-foot-4 Claypool with simple-to-understand betting odds. 

“They would throw these jump balls to him,” said Stevenson, the football coach at John Barsby Secondary School in B.C. “Those are supposed to be 50-50 balls. Except with Chase, they become 90-10 balls. His hands would be 11 feet in the air, while everyone else’s hands were 10 feet in the air.”

The Steelers' superb rookie has become just the fourth player -- and first receiver -- in NFL history with at least 10 touchdowns in his first 10 games. A graduate of Abbotsford Secondary School, an hour's drive east of Vancouver, he is rapidly evolving into one of pro football’s most dynamic weapons. 

If the sport’s elite defenders are having difficulty containing him, imagine what it was like for the poor Canadian high school kids tasked with stopping Claypool. The tales of dominance are similar to ones told by Ohio prep basketball players and coaches who faced LeBron James. 

DK Pittsburgh Sports spoke with 11 Canadian coaches about their memories of Claypool’s wondrous abilities, unique challenges, greatest moments and the secret weapon that should land him an endorsement deal with Heinz. 

Here are their stories:

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Teague Funk, former Abbotsford offensive coordinator: I remember vividly the first time I saw Chase. He was in Grade 7. I was running an after-school basketball program and we were throwing a football in the gym. He ran and dove into a high-jump mat to catch a ball and he must have jumped like 9-1/2 feet — like a broad jump. It was crazy.

Jay Fujimura, Abbotsford head coach: I saw him play in the community leagues — what you would call Pop Warner football — and at the time he wasn’t bigger than everybody else. He was just athletically gifted. He was making moves on the field that couldn’t be stopped. He was doing the same thing in middle school. But from Grade 10 to Grade 11, Chase goes from like 6-foot to 6-3. By Grade 12, he’s 6-foot-4, 230 pounds. 

Claypool (from day-after-draft news conference) : My feet were size-15 in Grade 7 or 8. I kind of knew I was going to be taller because I was pretty short for size-15 feet. 

Funk: His mom, Jasmine, is like 5-7. His dad is like 5-8. His brother, Jacob, is like 5-9. It was shocking to see Chase sprout up like that. And for him to keep his speed and agility was mind boggling. 

Eddie Ferg, Air Raid Academy coach/trainer: Chase was always active. He played high school football, he played 7-on-7 football with us down in Seattle. He also played basketball and was a snowboarder. Because he was so active, he never lost his agility or speed during his growth spurt. 

Karen Lopez, Air Raid Academy trainer: By the time we got him, he was a big dude. Extremely tall, but very athletic and powerful. We had him running 200-meter sprints and the first time I saw him run the corner my jaw dropped. He was not only athletic, but he had a diehard work ethic. Nothing was going to stop him from training and getting better.

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Claypool’s youth was filled with adversity. Jasmine was a single-parent mother who raised Chase along with his four brothers, two step-brothers and a sister in a small apartment. Money was tight and nutritious meals were sometimes scarce. 

Jasmine was away from home frequently working with a traveling carnival. His older sister, Ashley, ranked among his biggest fans, but she committed suicide when Claypool was 13.

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Travis Bell, Mouat Secondary School football coach: Chase’s story is pretty incredible. High school was not easy for him. He battled a few things. And whether he would finish his time out at Abbotsford was sometimes in question.

Elmore Abraham, Abbotsford defensive coordinator: It was a struggle in the beginning. Chase went to Bakersview (alternative school) for a few months in Grade 9. Myself or one of the other coaches would drive over and pick him up to keep him involved because you could see the kid had a future. The big thing was surrounding him with positive influences. Teachers, counsellors, role models. He had so much going on in his life. It’s not that he was a bad kid or needed a lot of help. He just needed structure.

Funk: His first few years, he didn’t like practice, but not many Grade 9 and Grade 10 kids do like practice. It’s challenging. The biggest thing with Chase is we didn’t know how to handle his athletic ability. Quite often, he was getting bored with what we were doing. It seemed to us that he was acting out, but it was more us not knowing how to handle his athleticism and how advanced he was compared to everyone else.

Claypool: I just think it gave me another thing, another reason to push that much harder. I kind of like to use adversity to my advantage and just learn from it and become a better person from it. With it happening early in my life, it helped me kind of push all the way through to where I am at now.

Bell: To see how Chase matured over the years and to watch him pay it forward the way he does now is really incredible.

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Claypool’s size and physical gifts began to draw attention from major college programs, especially as highlight packages circulated on Facebook. But being a punishing 6-foot-4 receiver and safety sometimes brought unwanted attention from the third team on the field.

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Abraham: He must have had at least one penalty a game. He was so big and when he hit kids, the flags would just fly. It didn’t matter that they were clean hits.

Funk: There was this one scene right out of “The Blindside.” Chase was blocking a guy and the ref threw a flag. The ref turned to us and kind of said, ‘He was blocking too hard.’ There were times he was triple teamed in pass coverage, guys just hanging off him, and he would get an offensive (pass interference penalty) because just a touch from a kid his size to a 155-pound defensive back would send him flying. He was something else, a real beast.

Fujimura: He had this built-up competitiveness that he didn’t know how to control at times. It was to the point where we sometimes had to pull the reins back a little bit.

Claypool: Being ultra competitive is who I am. I’ve been that way from Day 1. ... There have been some situations where I have been too competitive, but I’d rather be that way than not competitive at all.

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Claypool’s statistical dominance during his senior season at Abbotsford is difficult to comprehend. In 12 games, he amassed 1,473 receiving yards and 18 touchdown catches. Overall, he accounted for 29 TDs and registered 2,519 all-purpose yards. As a safety, he contributed 74 tackles and five interceptions.

Numbers alone, however, don’t tell the story of Claypool’s heroics.

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Funk: First thing you have to remember is he usually only played about three quarters because we were so far ahead in games.

Fujimura: There were games where he probably could have scored 10 touchdowns had I let him play the entire game.

Abraham: He was so knowledgeable about playing defense and he had great anticipation skills. He could totally be out of position and still end up making the play. He was basically our rover. He could do whatever he wanted. 

Funk: We had a good little quarterback (John Madigan), who tended to throw the ball high. I used to laugh and joke that it was perfect because you can’t teach the (vertical leap) Chase has. He just went up and got everything.

Brian Brady, Carson Graham Secondary School football coach: His catch radius is insane. If he’s able to get a hand to it, he can tip the ball to himself. I don’t know if his ball skills come from basketball or just natural talent, but they are amazing.

Bo Sidhu, Abbotsford athletic director: I remember a ball being throw like three yards out of bounds. Nobody is getting that. But Chase jumps up, knocks it back into play, catches the ball and runs about 70 yards for a touchdown.

Bell: Look at the length of his arms. They are incredible. 

David Mills, Robert Bateman Secondary School football coach: There was this play where Chase had motioned behind the quarterback for a fake or jet sweep. We rush the quarterback and I mean we have him pinned for a 10-yard loss. All of a sudden, Chase circles back around and takes the ball from the quarterback and scoots for a big gain. You could do everything right against him and he could still end up beating you. 

Bell: We have a 19-point lead on them with five minutes left in the game and Chase scores three touchdowns. I was over it until you asked me about it. Thanks a lot. ... We had done a pretty good job of containing him the whole game. Then, he makes a big play and they score. They onside kick it and Chase recovers it get. Then, he makes another big play and scores again. 

Brady: Sometimes, when you have big guys at the skill positions, they will take plays off. With him, he was still giving everything he had when he was hurt. He never shied away. He just kept putting himself in harm’s way to make a play. We have other big guys up here in B.C., but when you throw in his work ethic, he was almost unstoppable.

Bell: I remember relaxing a little bit when we had that 19-point lead and it’s one of those things I kick myself for doing to this day. You just can’t do that with Chase Claypool in a game.

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Claypool almost never left the field in a game. He served as Abbotsford’s star receiver, safety, punter and holder. The exhausting workload occasionally caused his legs to cramp. 

In the 2015 quarterfinal against Barsby, Claypool was in agony inside the visitor’s locker room at halftime. That’s when he reached inside his gym bag for a jar. The rest is Canadian high school football legend.

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Stevenson: We hit him all day. He played a courageous game. He made the plays and he paid the price for them. To his credit, we could never break him. I don't think he dropped a pass.

Lopez: It was like our second (7-on-7 game of the season) and Chase was starting to cramp up. I told him to go find some pickles, get a jar of them with the juice. I said, ‘Eat one now and go play. You won’t feel as crampy.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ I said ‘Yes. Eat a pickle and make sure you have the juice with you because it will help with restoring electrolytes.’

Fujimura: We joke about this now, but he was cramping up so bad at halftime that he downed this jar of pickle juice.

Funk: It was weird to see. It’s an old sprinter’s trick. You’re thinking maybe he’s gonna take a sip, but he’s taking these big gulps. His breath must have been terrible, but you do what you have to do. There were times in games when he would do the same thing with mustard. You would see all these mustard packets on the bench — just like the ones you might find at McDonald’s.

Stevenson: We were a buzz saw. We lawn mowed everyone we ran in to with our ground game. But on that day, Chase prevented so many long runs. We’re used to getting past (a defense's) front seven and going for 40 and 50 yards. He’s running sideline to sideline, making tackles that would hold us to 8 or 10 yards.

Fujimura: Chase finishes with 12 catches for 351 yards and four touchdowns. He had like seven carries for 44 yards and two more touchdowns. On defense, he made 17 tackles and had a pick. Greatest individual performance I’ve ever seen.

Funk: It was like watching a video game. When you are a little kid and you put Madden to “rookie” because you want to score a lot of points with the character you made. It was insane. At one point, they were quadruple teaming him and we were still throwing it his direction. Maybe that's not the right decision for an offensive coordinator, but we had the playmaker to pull it off.

Stevenson: I told the team after the game it hurts to lose, but that it was a privilege to play against that kind of athlete. We just ran into a different type of human being out there.

Fujimura: You have to take a ferry to get to Vancouver Island. On the way home, Chase couldn’t move. He was sore all over.

Stevenson: I told our local reporter this is how the Soviets must have felt when they encountered the Mach 3 SR 71 spy plane. They knew it was there, but it was just too high and too fast. Chase was higher than our anti-aircraft missiles.

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Abbortsford Secondary School

Chase Claypool.

Claypool was a two-sport athlete at Abbotsford. He helped lead his basketball team to the provincial championship game as a sophomore. In his senior year, he averaged nearly 40 points a contest.

Virinder Braich, former Robert Bateman Secondary School basketball coach: For us, it was how are we going to slow him down because you’re not going to stop him. We wanted to try to make others do more. In Grade 11, we would double him. By Grade 12, we were triple-teaming him. He was like LeBron James. Once he got going downhill, there’s no way a kid is picking up a charge. You are either going to foul him or he’s going to score. 

Sidhu: He wasn’t the greatest defensive player, but he’d just get the ball back and score again. Some of it was just conserving energy. He played all over the court. He would go to the hoop and dunk a lot. He’d get you on the perimeter and beat you off the dribble.

Braich: Give him the jump shot or let him drive? It was like picking the lesser of two evils. We would let him shoot because he might miss and we could get the rebound. But when he got to the hoop, he was too strong to stop.

Fujimura: He was very good at basketball, but when an assistant football coach from Michigan came here to recruit him, he told me, ‘We can throw change on the court and find a kid who’s that big and can play ball.’ It’s different in football. Guys his size don’t normally do what he does.

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Claypool guided the Abbotsford football team to the 2015 provincial championship game against Carson Graham. He delivered two touchdowns, and Abbotsford led 21-20 at halftime. 

But Claypool entered the game with a nagging hip injury that flared up after landing awkwardly in the end zone in the first quarter. Claypool already had committed to Notre Dame and was begging to stay in the game.

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Fujimura: His leg was locking up. It was painful for him to walk.

Funk: We wanted to win, obviously, and to bring the title back to our school and town, but at the end of day we had to worry about his future. You have to bite the bullet. We used him for a few plays in the second half, but mostly as a decoy.

Brady: He ended up playing less on defense and that helped us a lot. We had run the ball really well going into the game. Our quarterback ended up running for like 250 yards and seven touchdowns. If Chase was on the field for defense, we still would have had a good game, but not to that degree.

Fujimura: Chase was really upset, but he was limping really bad. I told him, ‘I know you’re mad, but we’ve got to look out for your future, too.’ I would never have been able to forgive myself if it would have cost him an opportunity to go to Notre Dame.

Brady: He was in pain, but he’d kept coming back in and making plays. The guy loves the program. He’s a selfless guy. He already had his scholarship wrapped up. He was doing it more for his team than himself. That’s just who he is. Last week, he caught a touchdown pass and made his touchdown celebration about JuJu Smith-Schuster, right? He’s a pretty good dude.

Funk: I reminisce about that game quite a bit. The pain Chase had in his eyes in wanting to get back on the field for our team . . . it made me want to well up.

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Claypool and his mother have founded the “Chasing Hope” program. It’s aimed at fundraising for youth suicide awareness, prevention and intervention. It’s obviously a cause close to his heart. Beyond the death of his sister, one of Claypool’s former high school teammates, Samwell Uko, committed suicide earlier this year.  

The program is one of several ways Claypool is giving back to Abbotsford.

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Sidhu: Chase is helping fund that with his name. We are going to start that program in our school in the coming year, and he’s a big part of it.

Fujimura: If you look closely at Chase’s wrist, he wears one of those rubber bracelets with Uko’s name on it. 

Funk: Going to Notre Dame was the best decision for Chase. It set him up not only for football, but for life. He became a man. When he comes back here, he’s a very humble guy willing to give back in any way. He loves the town, loves the school.

Sidhu: He hasn’t forgotten his roots. Chase flew up for the 2018 championship game and stood on the sideline to inspire the boys. He didn’t have to do that, but that’s what he’s all about.

Funk: He’s a special kid who’s been through a lot. Every challenge he’s faced, he’s risen and overcome it. He’s grown into this incredible young man who we now get to watch on Sundays.

Stevenson: He is a generational player. When he’s 26 years old, he will be able to squat his 23-year-old self. He’s only going to get better and stronger. 

Bell: I grew up with “Rudy” as one of my favorite movies, and then this kid from Abbotsford goes to Notre Dame and gets drafted in the second round. Now, that kid is having a great start to his career for the Pittsburgh Steelers. It’s an incredible story for a small town in Canada. He deserves it.