High school football: Local players get a leg up from BOOM - Chicago Sun-Times

Cameron Pickett is the kind of football player who could easily be overlooked by college recruiters.

He’s a junior wide receiver at Brooks, which finished 3-5 in the Public League’s Illini Heartland conference last season. The Eagles don’t play any suburban schools, though they did face two of the better city programs (Taft and Kenwood) last season.

But for Pickett to get his name out in the COVID-19 era — when summer college camps were canceled and CPS teams aren’t allowed fall contact days —he needed some help.

That’s where Midwest BOOM Football comes in.

“Since I go to a smaller profile CPS school, I get an opportunity to play against kids I wouldn’t be able to play in the (high school) regular season,” Pickett said. “Going with BOOM, it gives me an opportunity to get in more reps and keep perfecting my craft.”

Indeed. Since the 7-on-7 club’s founding nine years ago by three-time college All-American JR Niklos and Elliott Ivory, BOOM has emerged as the preferred destination for the area’s top college prospects. It offers the chance to compete against — and beat — teams from football hotbeds in the Sun Belt.

BOOM has won 11 national championships among the three major sanctioning bodies (NFA7v7, Pylon and Pro Football Hall of Fame). More importantly, it has given its players a leg up in recruiting.

Midwest BOOM’s founder Elliott Ivory reacts during the football tournament at St. Francis.

Kirsten Stickney/For the Sun-Times

If BOOM’s formula — taking talented, motivated kids around the country to play their peers in events designed to showcase them for colleges — sounds like AAU basketball, it’s no accident.

Ivory, who played football at Proviso West and Western Illinois, used to travel the club basketball circuit and it gave him an idea.

“I said, ‘This would be incredible if they had this for football players,’” Ivory said. “There was one 7-on-7 team in Chicago at the time ... I told JR we should start a 7-on-7 team.”

Even if the idea didn’t take off, Ivory figured it might at least drive traffic to the founders’ other businesses — his video production company and Niklos’ athlete training facility.

The initial response was modest. There were 22 players in the program that first season. Now, 300 kids show up to tryouts, and BOOM has around 130 high school players and 150-200 grade schoolers in the program.

The high school roster includes the state’s consensus top two juniors in receivers Kaleb Brown of St. Rita and Tyler Morris of Nazareth, as well as the No 1 sophomore in Marist receiver Carnell Tate.

It’s been an intense education for Morris, a four-star prospect who didn’t play receiver until his freshman year. He credits BOOM’s coaches for taking him to the next level.

“Learning how to sit in zones and get off press, that helped turn me into a good receiver,” Morris said.

So did playing four- and five-star prospects from Florida, Georgia and other football hotbeds — and maybe gaining their respect.

“You’re going to hear from them, ‘Illinois and Chicago is just basketball players,’” Morris said. “They say that every tournament.”

But BOOM’s athletes — including alumni like Michigan-bound quarterback JJ McCarthy, now starring for national prep No. 1 IMG Academy in Florida — have helped raise Chicago football’s profile.

How does it work? “BOOM takes your focus off everything else,” Tate said. “You’re just zoned into football and being able to compete.”

Ivory, one of the faces of BOOM along with Niklos and Mike Bertschinger, helps provide that focus.

“He’s calm when he needs to be,” Morris said of Ivory. “But when you’re on the field, he’s not going to hold back what he thinks. He’s trying to push you to make you better.”

Tate puts it this way: “Elliott ... has his levels. He can go from zero to 100 and 100 back to zero in seconds.”

“My coaching style, I like to call it passionate,” Ivory said. “I explain that to the team — you want to be someone who holds yourself accountable.

“I teach them at an early age how to live in the real world. I feel like I had to figure it out through trial and error.”

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High school football: Local players get a leg up from BOOM - Chicago Sun-Times
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