Former Perrysburg football coach Matt Kregel and his wife Jennifer have three daughters, aged 21, 19 and 14.
If Kregel did have a son, however, he certainly wouldn’t mind if that young man was current Perrysburg senior Cade Zimmerly, the 2020 All-Blade football player of the year.
“The players have joked about that for a couple years, saying, ‘If you had a son, you’d want him to be Cade, right?’ They see that,” Kregel said. “There’s nothing pretentious about him. He just goes about his business. If you’re a football coach, you’d want that guy to be your son. He goes to work every day, and he does not talk trash or showboat. He just wakes up, kicks [butt], and repeats the next day. That’s what you’d want your son to be like.
“Off the field, he’s kind of an introvert. People maybe expect him to be this brash, hard-core, rough kind of guy, and he’s not at all. He’s very quiet and reserved and at ease in his own skin.”
Zimmerly helped Perrysburg to a 7-2 overall record and to the school’s first Northern Lakes League championship since 2015.
He is the second two-way lineman to win the award, joining St. Francis' Joe Iorio in 1998.
Linemen typically struggle for notoriety compared to more glamorous positions. At those spots, excellence can be quantified by statistics. But arguably no player from the northwest Ohio/southeast Michigan area did more for his team this season than Zimmerly.
And, perhaps no Perrysburg player ever inspired so many superlatives from his head coach.
“To our team the last several years, he’s meant everything,” Kregel said. “You can see the on-the-field dominance. Cade’s one of those players where you don’t have to know football to see what he can do. He jumps off the screen at you.
“In a day and age when everybody wants to see 6-foot-5 and 280 pounds for a lineman, here’s a kid who’s 6-foot-1 who dominates guys that size. The other thing that makes Cade incredible is that he also does it in practice every day.”
The 6-foot-1, 260-pound Zimmerly, who committed Sunday to play at Bowling Green State University, was a high school football rarity — a four-year starter on both the offensive and defensive lines.
The statistics for offensive linemen are limited, but there are two the left tackle produced this season in nine games, and in his career, that seem mythical – 78 pancake blocks in 2020, and 254 in his career.
On defense, Zimmerly added 56 tackles, including five for losses, and two sacks this season. In his career, he totaled 164 tackles, 18 TFLs, and 14 sacks.
Stats don’t seem to mean much to Zimmerly, who evaluates his own play differently.
“I think some of the highlights were learning from mistakes,” he said. “I made a lot of mistakes early on, and kind of just learned from them. I was coached up to be a better player
“That’s something I took from the last four years. You’re going to make mistakes, but you have to learn from them and get better.”
Zimmerly’s formula for success was born in the weight room over the past four years — one rep at a time. These days, he bench presses 340 pounds, squats 500 pounds, and dead lifts 600. And, he has been timed at 4.9 seconds in the 40-yard dash.
“I trained all the time like I was in a game,” Zimmerly said. “I went 100 percent every time, whether I was in a workout or in conditioning, and whether I was by myself or with a workout partner.
“A big part of that was that my teammates pushed me to condition myself to play both ways. I was part of the class that showed that you needed to do the work in the weight room to win, and you needed to do all the little things. My class left that mark, and that’s something I’m proud of.”
The consistent training paid off in the form of an ironman four-year effort by Zimmerly.
“Everybody who’s ever been a two-way lineman understands how exhausted you get doing it,” Kregel said. “Literally, there’s no plays off. And, you have to go as hard as you can on every play until the whistle.
“For him to do that, without many breaks, is impressive. He never asks to take a break. We have to take him off the field just to make sure we’re taking care of him. I’ve never seen anything like it. The kid does not get tired.”
Stamina aside, Zimmerly also possessed a unique skill his coach had not witnessed in any past player.
“On both sides of the ball, he has the greatest leverage I’ve ever seen,” Kregel said. “He gets his shoulders and hips down, and he gets underneath people’s pads better than anybody I’ve ever coached or watched. College coaches had reservations about his size, but I would tell them you’ve got to throw that out with him. You’ve got to watch his leverage, and how he bends people over backwards and puts them on the ground.
“There’s also the contact that he makes. When he hits a linebacker, sometimes their feet come off the ground.”
As physically imposing as Zimmerly was on the field, he is at the other end of the spectrum away from it.
“Off the field, I’m kind of quiet and keep to myself,” Zimmerly said. “I don’t like to mess with people.
“But, once I get my pads and a helmet on, I kind of change to the mindset of, ‘I want to go out and hit someone.’ It doesn’t matter the size, how big you are, or how good you are. I’m going to go 100 percent at you no matter what.”
The superlatives bounce both ways between the former and current linemen.
“I really look up to coach Kregel and respect him,” Zimmerly said. “I feel like he’s done a lot for me, and that there’s no way that I can repay him. He’s put me in front of college coaches, and he’s done countless things for me. I can’t put into words how much respect I have for him.
“I remember my eighth-grade year I made a pick-six and I saw him standing in the back of the end zone. I looked to make sure he was watching to kind of show off. He’s a guy who I always tried to earn his respect. He’s taught me a lot of lessons. I guess you could say he’s been like a second dad.”
First Published November 25, 2020, 12:30 p.m.
