Here's dad saying all the right things for the article. You know that what he really wanted to say was, "I raised a gawt damn idiot." Srrsly, though, good to see there are actually kids out there like this. Copied from the al's of the .coms
Thompson’s Trent Seaborn was washing dishes after school recently when dad Jason told him about some recent news.
A trading card company had approached the family about an NIL deal for the 16-year-old Thompson quarterback, a story first reported by WVTM Channel 13′s Ryan Hennessy.
“I told him ‘I got some good news and some bad news so how do you want it,’” Jason said. “He said ‘I want the bad news first’ and I said well, NIL is still not allowed in Alabama and he said ‘what’s the good news?’ I told him there’s a trading card company that wants to give you a seven-figure NIL and he sort of laughed and that was it. He just chuckled and continued washing the dishes and so I prodded at him, asking him what he thought because we’d have to move out of state. He didn’t bite, just kind of shrugged his shoulders.
“I said, ‘do you want to?’ He laughed and said ‘no, absolutely not.’ He said there was no way he would leave coach Mark (Freeman) and that program, his brothers, the team he’s so close with.”
The sophomore phenom has already started 17 games for the Warriors, including four as an eighth-grader leading Thompson to the Class 7A championship.
The family was in Tallahassee, Fla., as Trent visited Florida State over the weekend. The Seminoles have offered Seaborn as have Alabama, Auburn, LSU, Clemson, Oregon, Ole Miss and more.
Quarterback-whisperer Freeman is a strong mentor.
“He’s like coaching a college kid,” Freeman said in an earlier interview with AL.com. “He’s 6-1, 190 now. When he played in his first state championship game, he was 5-8, 150. To make him elite in every situation, we have to keep working on his speed and muscle twitch – the things that would separate him from the rest. He already throws as good or better than anyone. He’s smart. He studies the game. He’s strong in the weight room. He’s complete.”
The Seaborn family is enjoying life in Alabaster.
“Trent is in an incredibly blessed situation right now to be where he is at Thompson High School, the premier school in Alabama and one of the top in the country,” Jason said “He’s blessed with a an incredible coaching staff that loves on him, that works with him, that gets him better. And as long as he stays the course, I think he’ll be fine. He’ll get to where he needs to go.”
The elder Seaborn has a unique perspective on NIL money.
“When the topic first came up and this is before anything like this ever was presented to us, I sort of thought about NIL at the collegiate and high school level,” Jason said. “And I thought ‘what’s wrong with it? Why shouldn’t the kid earn money?’
“But in a lot of my conversations with coach Freeman, he had some perspective that I had not really thought about that I think is incredibly important. It’s a Pandora’s box, introducing things like the dynamics of a locker room at the high school level. All of a sudden you introduce money and that’s the potential for ruining a locker room, ruining the team chemistry and creating animosity between players.
“If a state is going to pass it or whatnot, I think No. 1 it would be great if they could do it in a way that many people could benefit, like a school could benefit or an entire program could benefit and just do it in a way that that can preserve the purity of the sport and not have it devolve into pay for play.
“It’s definitely a complex subject. You can’t just say let’s make it all legal and go from there because I think you’re going to ruin a high school experience for a majority of kids that this is going to be their only experience playing football and that’s what I also have a problem with. That four years in high school is going to last them a lifetime of memories. Do do we really want to tarnish it for the sake of a few thousand bucks for a very small percentage of other kids?”
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