"the People's Paths!" Cherokee News Path - SS Football Players Invited to Elite Camp, Win Awards

"Sequoyah Junior Chris Littlehead earned the Most Outstanding Player Award at Football University in Austin, Texas.Sequoyah Junior Chris Littlehead earned the Most Outstanding Player Award at Football University in Austin, Texas."

TAHLEQUAH, Oklahoma - Springtime is typically a time to think of flowers and rain, not helmets and footballs. But, the football players at Sequoyah Schools aren’t taking the spring season off to stop and smell the roses, they are already working hard to prepare for next fall. Hard work and preparation earned two Sequoyah football players an invitation to attend Football University in Austin, Texas, the most elite football training camp in the country. Senior Chris Littlehead and eighth-grader Brayden Scott represented their school well by bringing home a couple of the camp’s top awards.

“Chris is one of the top recruits in the state of Oklahoma,” said Brent Scott, Sequoyah Schools’ head football coach. “He is very worthy of this award and he will have a few more awards to go with it before he graduates.”

Littlehead won the Maxwell Award for the Most Outstanding Player at the camp and Brayden Scott won the award for being the Top Underclassmen Quarterback.

“Football is challenging and competitive,” Littlehead said. “I hope to earn a scholarship to play football in college and get a degree.”

“He’s getting lots of attention from colleges,” Scott said. “Lots of schools have contacted him. I think he will be able to play at the college level and it will be a nice way for him to pay for college.”

In addition to the training at Football University, Sequoyah football players have also attended DeBartolo Sports University in Dallas and have many other camps and trainings on the horizon.

“These kids work very hard in the off-season,” Scott said. “I will be real disappointed if we don’t make it to the state tournament next year. I expect to still be playing football well into late November.”

The Sequoyah football team will start next year off with 32 seniors, the largest group of Sequoyah seniors to ever play together on one team.

“They’ve been groomed really well,” Scott said of next year’s seniors. “They are a winning class of kids and have only lost a total of 3 football games in their entire career.”

The Sequoyah football team will kick their season off on September 4 against Ft. Gibson. A complete football schedule for 2009 can be found on the Sequoyah Schools web site.

Sequoyah Schools, a boarding school for Native American students, originated in 1871 as an orphan asylum to care for children who were orphaned by the Civil War. Now known as Sequoyah Schools, it is named for Sequoyah, the scholar who developed the Cherokee syllabary. The school is regionally and state accredited for grades 7-12 and has become the school of choice for more than 400 Native American students every year. Sequoyah Schools is located five miles southwest of Tahlequah, Oklahoma. For more information call 918-453-5400.