Caleb Taylor moved across the country to realize football dream
Caleb Taylor, a senior at The Salisbury School in Salisbury, Connecticut, realized his dream of being a starting quarterback after unsuccessful attempts at Layton High and Fremont High.
The Salisbury School seal
Transfer policies for high school athletes wouldn’t be so controversial if so many students weren’t willing to jump schools for purely athletic reasons.
Caleb Taylor is one of those athletes, and he doesn’t deny it.
Taylor’s case is rare, though. He didn’t just transfer to another school — he moved away from his family to a school over 2,000 miles away.
He moved from Plain City all the way to Salisbury, Connecticut so he could attend Salisbury School, an all-boys private boarding school, and be the starting quarterback on the football team.
The season ended and Taylor was since invited to participate in the NoKaOi Senior Bowl in Honolulu, Hawaii.
To say the least, he has no regrets about his move.
“I was very, very blessed to have this opportunity,” Taylor said. “It’s an amazing school and an amazing program.”
His belief was always that he could be an effective starting quarterback. He attended a Rivals.com quarterback challenge camp in 2015 and was given the Mr. Mechanics award. The year before, he went to a collegiate prospect showcase camp at the University of Utah and was named the QB MVP.
Taylor played his freshman and sophomore years at Layton High but cracked his fibula early in his sophomore season. The family moved to Plain City in order to help Taylor’s grandmother with a family farm and he subsequently enrolled at Fremont High.
Taylor planned on competing for the quarterback job at Fremont but the odds were against him. Saxton Morby, who was in the same grade as Taylor, had gained experience as the team’s starter in the playoffs as a sophomore following an injury to then-Silver Wolves usual starter Justin Shaw.
Morby went on to start the entire 2015 season.
As recently as last summer – when Taylor was preparing for his senior year at Fremont – he was working on his punting because that’s where he thought he might be able to help the team.
About three weeks before Fremont’s season opener against Bonneville, Taylor got a text from a recruiter for Salisbury who said the school’s football coach, Chris Phelps, was looking for a starting quarterback.
According to Taylor’s father, Rick Taylor, the recruiter knew someone who attended BYU, and that someone put the recruiter in touch with Riley Jensen at Mountain West Elite, a football instructional camp.
Jensen has known Taylor for about five years, and when the recruiter said he was looking for someone who wasn’t starting but was capable of starting, Jensen thought of Taylor.
“I said, ‘I got the guy,'” Jensen said.
Jensen described Taylor as a “big, strong, athletic kid and certainly a kid that loves football.”
“When you love football, usually good things can happen,” Jensen said. “He just happened to be in a situation where he was behind Tayler Katoa at Layton and Saxton Morby at Fremont, and those are two really good quarterbacks as well.”
Jensen said he didn’t tell Taylor to go to Salisbury, but he said it was “kind of cool” when Taylor did take advantage of the opportunity.
Initially, the teen wasn’t interested. Having already moved from one high school, he wasn’t thrilled about doing so again.
Phelps persisted, and after some praying and talking with his family, Taylor decided to go for it.
“Some were not so excited about it, but I had friends that were really supportive of it and, for the most part, everyone was supportive,” Taylor said.
Taylor’s father said the family was supportive, knowing another chance might not come along.
“It’s either, ‘OK, I’m going to go play and start and have some playing time and continue my dream to make it to the next level, or resort to playing a secondary position (at Fremont),'” Rick Taylor said.
Phelps said he persisted for two reasons. One, he really needed a quarterback, and two, as he watched video and got to know Taylor he knew he was “not only a good football player, but a quality young man” who “was going to represent Salisbury and our football program the right way.”
Phelps said he knows he put Taylor in “a tough spot” but that “as far as his role in what we were doing, we were really pleased.”
Jensen called Taylor’s journey one of the “unsung stories of Mountain West Elite.”
“There’s just things that happen sometimes to kids that could have at another school or in another situation excelled,” Jensen said. “They just kind of accept their fate. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think Caleb wanted to accept he wasn’t good enough to play somewhere.”
To contact reporter Ryan Comer, email rcomer@Standard.net.