Little commits to Yale

The Sebastian Little story took an unexpected turn this week.

The Cheshire receiver/linebacker had been heavily recruited by Yale but with the uncertainty surrounding the Yale program after the resignation of head coach Tom Williams, Little ended up committing to Harvard.

Earlier today Cheshire coach Mark Ecke e-mailed the Register's lead high school football writer Mike Pucci to tell him that Little was committing to Yale but then sent another e-mail asking Mike to hold off on reporting that info. Finally Ecke got back to Mike and confirmed that Little would indeed be committing to Yale. I know that the previous Yale staff loved Little and saw him as being an outstanding linebacker prospect.

A story in the Meriden Record-Journal, the paper which first reported Little's commitment to Harvard,  documents what happened with Little's decision to decommit from Harvard and come to Yale. As the story indicates, the decision to reopen the process was Little's and his family's and not the case of Reno going after a player committed to Harvard.

The Record-Journal also reported that Choate receiver Avery Lewis also committed to Yale. I'll have to check into that in the morning. The Lewis situation was a little bizarre. What I was told originally is that Lewis was set to commit to Yale and all he had to do was make his visit to meet with the Yale coaches last month. However, when he left Yale after his visit, there was no offer made to Lewis and the Choate coaches were left to wonder if they needed to burn up the phone lines to find a landing spot for Lewis, who came to Choate from Texas with the idea of landing at Yale. While it was not as set in stone as what happened with Xavier defensive lineman Sean Marinan, there was some skepticism about Lewis landing at Yale.

Finally, the father of new Yale commit Blake Thomson, a tight end/linebacker out of Battle Ground Academy in Nashville, Tenn. sent me a link to a blog he has been writing documenting his son's recruitment. The blog said that Thomson was set to commit to Harvard only to get word a couple weeks back that he was not accepted. The previous Yale coaching staff did not recruit Thomson but with Reno coming over from Harvard and three of his assistant coaches also being on Tim Murphy's Harvard staff, there was a connection there and now Thomson is bound for Yale.