BV’s Green is the consummate team player

Kevan Green

Story and photo by

LIZ ROBERTSON

Kevan Green has already learned many valu­able life lessons.

The Buck­eye Val­ley senior plays quar­ter­back for the Barons and was pleased they had a respectable final sea­son with a record of 6–4, earn­ing sec­ond team all con­fer­ence. He admit­ted the record his junior year was not quite as good at 4–6.

“Junior year was really rough,” he said, adding that the teams the pre­vi­ous three years were good.

“Being the quar­ter­back, I took a lot of the blame. But it was one of my biggest learn­ing expe­ri­ences ever,” Kevan said of his junior year.

“It was kind of like a mon­key on my back. I hated it at the time, but look­ing back, as a nat­ural leader expe­ri­ence, you take the blame. It’s part of the job.”

Kevan said that he both learned and grew from the expe­ri­ence. His coach agreed.

“In my mind, he was the con­sum­mate team player, totally unselfish, totally focused on what was best for our team,” foot­ball coach Michael Mar­shall said. “In the Buck­eye Val­ley foot­ball pro­gram we have one team rule; it is: Every­thing you do should bring pride to your­self, your fam­ily, this foot­ball team, school and com­mu­nity. From what I have wit­nessed in Kevan Green, not only has he never bro­ken this rule, if any­thing, his actions have strength­ened the rule and have served as an out­stand­ing exam­ple for our younger stu­dent ath­letes to fol­low. I have a young son who serves as a ball boy on our team. Kevan Green is his role model and I feel I am a lucky par­ent because Kevan is that role model.”

Play­ing foot­ball since sec­ond grade, Kevan tore his ACL dur­ing his sopho­more year, miss­ing the sea­son. He’s had some lin­ger­ing shoul­der issues this year.

“Half of being suc­cess­ful in foot­ball is being injury free,” he said.

Mar­shall, who has been Kevan’s foot­ball coach for the past seven years, said that Kevan “embod­ied every­thing a high school foot­ball quar­ter­back is sup­posed to be. I’ve coached high school foot­ball for 34 years and Kevan is eas­ily the hard­est work­ing, most ded­i­cated and intel­li­gent indi­vid­ual I have worked with. He is an indi­vid­ual who works his hard­est not only to per­son­ally improve but also for the good and well being of others.”

Mar­shall described Kevan as “a stu­dent ath­lete with incred­i­ble ded­i­ca­tion, deter­mi­na­tion and com­mit­ment. A stu­dent ath­lete who showed up on time, put forth a great effort and worked to the best of their abil­ity. Here is a young man, who was the def­i­n­i­tion of what a high school stu­dent ath­lete should be.”

Foot­ball runs in Kevan’s fam­ily. His father played for Ohio Wes­leyan and the Kevan goes with his par­ents and younger sis­ter each year to Detroit Lions games.

“We’re a big foot­ball fam­ily,” Kevan said, not­ing that the Green’s even hold­ing their Thanks­giv­ing cel­e­bra­tion a day early so they can go to the game. One year, the fam­ily packed up din­ner and had it in the park­ing lot. “Good mem­o­ries,” Kevan said.

Kevan plans to con­tinue play­ing foot­ball in col­lege and is con­sid­er­ing Otter­bein Col­lege, the Col­lege of Wooster and Hope Col­lege in Michigan.

But his ulti­mate deci­sion, he said, rests on the best aca­d­e­mic pro­gram and the finan­cial offers he receives.

“Aca­d­e­mics, obvi­ously, take first place,” said Kevan, who is look­ing at var­i­ous pre-med pro­grams. He is con­sid­er­ing either ortho­pe­dics or pre-dentistry. With ortho­pe­dics, he can fol­low the ath­letic inter­est he has, and with den­tistry, he would be fol­low­ing in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps.

Kevan is also con­sid­er­ing a mil­i­tary res­i­dency, which his grand­fa­ther did and became one of the “best tech­ni­cal den­tists ever seen” thanks to the experience.

“I can travel, too,” Kevan said of a pos­si­ble stint with the armed forces. He does know he is look­ing at eight years of school either way, with another four to eight years in res­i­dency. Though even with time poten­tially spent trav­el­ing, Kevan said, “Delaware is the place to raise a family.”

In the mean­time, while Kevan is not as busy with the foot­ball sea­son — and its 12-hour days — over, he still stays active with vol­un­teer work through church, the National Honor Soci­ety and stu­dent council.

He has been run­ning his own land­scap­ing busi­ness as well for the last few years.

“I did not expect it to grow as much as it has,” he said. As other friends went on to work fast food jobs, he decided that was not what he wanted, so he built his busi­ness through word of mouth. Today, he has six or seven cus­tomers for the sea­son with addi­tional mulching jobs on the side. “It’s kept me with some money.”

Kevan will also soon begin a new posi­tion work­ing at the recep­tion desk at the new YMCA in Delaware.

Besides the advanced place­ments courses Kevan is in this year, he is also tak­ing astron­omy and enjoys learn­ing the struc­ture and func­tion of “how things work.”

Gery Kovatch is Kevan’s physics teacher.

“Kevan excels in dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions because he thrives on being chal­lenged. I can say that first­hand because that’s exactly how Kevan han­dled the pre-calculus, hon­ors physics and ap cal­cu­lus courses I teach — he excelled in each of them! That’s also how he over­came the adver­sity he faced as the quar­ter­back of the foot­ball team his junior year — he led the team to a win­ning record as a senior. Kevan’s com­pas­sion­ate side emerged when he arranged for the foot­ball play­ers to sign a foot­ball that the team deliv­ered to a girl in our com­mu­nity who has leukemia. So, on or off the grid­iron, Kevan loves to be chal­lenged, but he has a deep appre­ci­a­tion for those who face some of life’s more seri­ous chal­lenges as well,” Kovatch said.

Guid­ance coun­selor Jean­nie Hall said Kevan is “an out­stand­ing gen­tle­man, scholar/athlete, and an exem­plary role model for his peers and for younger stu­dents. He excels in the class­room and in his extra-curricular involve­ment. He sets high stan­dards for him­self and strives to be suc­cess­ful. He has chal­lenged him­self by tak­ing our advanced place­ment and hon­ors classes. He con­tin­ues to be dili­gent in his work ethic as he heads into this last semes­ter of high school. His goal is to be a doc­tor and to be a pos­i­tive influ­ence on oth­ers. I am con­fi­dent that he will con­tinue to strive for these goals. Our Buck­eye Val­ley com­mu­nity is proud of Kevan’s accom­plish­ments and the type of young man that he has become.”

Hall added that Kevan was also recently awarded the Franklin B. Wal­ter All-Scholastic Award. It is a “big honor” as only one per county is bestowed, she said.

While look­ing for­ward to end-of-the-year activ­i­ties at Buck­eye Val­ley, Kevan also eagerly awaits a trip out west this sum­mer with his father where they will go off-roading in the deserts of Utah with friends.

As to the future, Kevan is excited over­all, admit­ting to being just a lit­tle bit ner­vous about head­ing off to col­lege. And he offers the fol­low­ing advice to others.

“Be your own per­son. Stick to your own morals,” he said. “As other peo­ple change, it is easy to change to the neg­a­tive, so stick to your morals.”

He added with a wry grin, “It is also easy to stress your­self out.”

Kevan is the son of Robert and Mitzi Green of Delaware.

Posted by Liz Robertson on Feb 24 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.