Player of the Year: New to football, Ben Lomond lineman Jake East was a force on defense
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- Ben Lomond lineman Jake East, the 2023 Standard-Examiner All-Area Football Player of the Year, poses for a photo Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024, at BLHS in Ogden.
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- Ben Lomond’s Jake East (58) battles Union’s Will Gamble (14) in a 3A first-round game Friday, Oct. 20, 2023, in Ogden.
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- Ben Lomond lineman Jake East, the 2023 Standard-Examiner All-Area Football Player of the Year, poses for a photo Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024, at BLHS in Ogden.
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- Ben Lomond lineman Jake East, the 2023 Standard-Examiner All-Area Football Player of the Year, poses for a photo Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024, at BLHS in Ogden.
OGDEN — Starting around the sixth grade, Jake East went to private training sessions run by Nate Tuatagaloa to get more athletic and help him get better at basketball.
Ever since, Tuatagaloa has tried to get East to play football as well.
East, a senior at Ben Lomond High, finally tried football in June 2022 ahead of his junior year.
“I realized I was, like, big and so I was like, ‘I might as well try it,’ and it might make me a better athlete for basketball. All my friends were playing so I just wanted to be with them longer,” East said. “So I did it and, sure, enough it made all those things better.”
In just his second year playing football, East, a defensive and offensive lineman, put up 55 tackles, 20 tackles for loss and 11 sacks in 11 games for the Scots this past season.
He played a large part in helping Ben Lomond to a 6-5 record — its first winning season since 2000 — the school’s first win over Ogden in the Iron Horse since 2016, and its first home playoff game since 1983.
East is the 2023 Standard-Examiner All-Area Football Player of the Year. He had a good junior season, and felt his senior year was better.
“Oh yeah, 100%. I actually knew what I was doing somewhat,” he said.
East faced constant double teams so he couldn’t always make the play, but his teammates made enough tackles around him and he learned to live with the double team.
Still, he had plenty of moments.
East had an ideal combination of size, speed, strength and game awareness that led him to play well and to attract a handful of college programs. It also came after dedicated work on his technique during the offseason.
One routinely saw East blow through double teams, or basically walk past an offensive lineman after using a “swim” move, or go out in the flats in pass coverage, or make a tackle with one arm while occupying an O-lineman.
Or, on one play against Juan Diego, push the left tackle all the way into the quarterback to force a bad throw.
“I try to run through them, I can’t let them hurt me. We gotta be the aggressors,” East said in the summer.
He started on both sides of the ball — an exhausting task, especially in the hot-weather games of August. Physically, it took him a couple games to get used to playing 90% or more of plays each game.
In Week 3 against Evanston (Wyoming), East had seven tackles, two sacks and two tackles for loss and the Scots won 39-21.
“Evanston was when I really started to like get my groove in. That was like my momentum game, that was a big game,” he said.
Toward the end of the season, East’s impact grew. He had five tackles, with three for loss including a sack, and two fumble recoveries in a 23-10 win over Union.
In a 34-18 win at Juan Diego: nine tackles, three TFLs, three sacks, two forced fumbles.
Juan Diego, a Wing-T program that won all seven prior meetings with BL by an average of 42 points, rushed for 169 yards (below its 206-yard per-game average).
“We just shut it down on the D-line, they didn’t get nothing on us, so that was a special game for us,” East said.
In the Iron Horse Game, a 21-7 win over Ogden: six tackles, two TFLs, two sacks and a game-sealing pick-six after almost intercepting another pass earlier.
“The Iron Horse? That was something special,” East said.
Beating Ogden officially secured the Scots’ winning record and also a tied-for-second finish in the 3A North region, whose teams had mostly taken turns blowing out BL the previous two seasons.
Not to be forgotten, East played right tackle on the offensive line, blocking the blind side for left-handed quarterback Manase Tuatagaloa, which turned out to be a vital role in the Scots’ pass-first offense.
East initially transferred to Ben Lomond as a sophomore to play basketball, and he’s been a standout hooper for the Scots over the last couple of seasons. Football hooked him, even when his first month of football, June 2022, was mostly filled with conditioning and lifting weights.
“I just liked the work of it and it felt good, so that whole summer I just went, I continued the month after June and then my first camp, that was fun, at Evanston,” East said. “It just went on from there.”
The journey will go on to Pocatello, Idaho, where he has a football scholarship to Idaho State.