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fter a Syracuse football training camp practice on Friday, Aug. 8, an exhausted Demetres Samuel Jr. jogged away from the team’s midfield huddle. For the freshman who plays both cornerback and wide receiver, practice sessions typically end with him panting for extra air. He’d just finished another afternoon splitting time between receiver and corner drills, preparations for his plan to, one day, play every down of every game.
All gas, literally no breaks.
“It’s funny because I’m in the corner room all day with my guys. We lock it in, we watch film, then we talk trash to the receivers every day,” Samuel said, recounting a typical day for him at SU’s fall training camp. “And then I always know when I go to offense, now it’s my turn to trash talk the corners.”
The 17-year-old yearned to be in an ultra-competitive environment like this. It’s why Samuel left Heritage High School (Florida) a year early; he felt high school football was too easy for him. Now, with the daily regimen SU head coach Fran Brown has instilled, he says his legs devolve into mush following each practice — in his eyes, the ideal post-workout state.
What’s taken Samuel’s teammates and coaches aback is how well he’s held his own against guys who are, at times, half a decade older than him.
Frankly, Samuel doesn’t think Division I football is that hard.
“Obviously, I’m in college now, but I’m adjusting very well, as you can probably see,” Samuel said, before unleashing a maniacal giggle.
Samuel isn’t even old enough to vote, but the wunderkind believes he’s ready to conquer college football. After an illustrious high-school career in Florida, where he won back-to-back district titles and became a top-20 prospect in the state, ESPN named Samuel as one of 2025’s top 10 incoming freshmen and On3 as a True Freshman All-American. After reclassifying to the 2025 class, he became SU’s highest-rated freshman of the recruiting cycle.
There is nothing Samuel can’t do on the gridiron. Coaches and teammates say he runs like a deer, boasts the strength of an ox and has the stamina of a rabid dog. He possesses a level of pure athleticism and gravitas that few players in Orange football history have arrived onto the scene with — a generational talent if there ever was one.
Before his highly-anticipated freshman season, where Brown said Samuel will start at cornerback and see time at wide receiver, Samuel is primed to take the mantle from reigning Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter as the sport’s next two-way star.
Syracuse players and coaches are already gushing over the potential the swiss army knife has to take the college football world by storm.
“He’s just a dog. That’s all I can say. Just a dog,” senior defensive back Devin Grant said of Samuel. “You can’t even tell that he’s 17 years old.”
“That kid’s so talented. There’s not a lot (for him) to work on,” wide receivers coach Myles White said.
“I don’t really have to worry about anything over there with him,” said redshirt sophomore cornerback Chris Peal, SU’s presumed No. 1 corner.
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When Samuel played little league football in his hometown of Palm Bay, Florida, Heritage High School football head coach Mykel Benson often watched his games. Benson saw the same player then as he sees now: one with a deadly combination of intelligence and speed.
Samuel’s parents, Demetres Sr. and Kristal, said their son was the lone kid on the field who could read both an opposing offense and defense. When Samuel was 10, his team’s coach got suspended for one game, forcing Demetres Sr. into action as the acting coach. Demetres Sr. started his son at quarterback and ran a zone-read offense. Samuel ran for five touchdowns. On the other end, he suffocated the opposing offense by constantly meeting rushers in the correct gap.
Once Demetres Sr. learned his son was serious about wanting to be a professional football player, he ensured Samuel centered his life around achieving that goal. As the fifth-youngest child of six siblings, there were no shortcuts in the Samuel household.
Demetres Sr. took his kids on runs around the neighborhood. He’d make them do 100 pushups a day. As Samuel entered high school, that number increased to 200 pushups a day. Every morning before school, this was his routine. By the end of each week, he’d accumulate over 1,000 pushups to satisfy Demetres Sr.’s wishes.
But Samuel never complained. His father wanted to teach him the immense sacrifice it takes to reach football’s highest level, but it seemed like Samuel innately understood that.
“Once you set a standard, you can never go below that,” Demetres Sr. tells his son. “You need to go higher than that standard.”
Samuel has taken his father’s words to heart. He wants to be the best at everything. Not only did he dominate Florida’s youth football scene, he would school his family members at any board game of his choosing. Samuel developed a knack for winning every single game of “Uno” — the reason why he dons No. 1 on his jersey today, Kristal said. His endless motor helped him become an all-district track runner as a sophomore in high school, posting a scintillating 10.52s 100-meter time and a 23.24s 200-meter.
“It’s not just on the football field; it’s all the time,” Kristal said of her son’s competitive fire. “‘Uno,’ ‘Monopoly,’ anything he can get his hands on, he makes sure that he wins and lets you know about it.”
Continuing to exceed his father’s standard, Samuel transferred to Heritage High School entering his sophomore year, wanting to carve out a spot on one of Florida’s top programs. Benson said Samuel came in with strong athletic tools but had a fairly scrawny stature.
Then came Frantz Polimice.
Heritage’s former strength and conditioning coach immediately saw Samuel’s potential. From the moment he heard rumblings about Samuel possibly transferring to Heritage, he couldn’t wait to start working with him. When those rumblings become reality, Polimice took Samuel under his wing, helping develop the freshman from a raw talent into a pure specimen.
“He was playing off just athleticism at the time that he came in,” Polimice said of Samuel. “I just took on the role of being his mentor. I was like, ‘I see something in him,’ and I knew he knows what it takes to get to the next level.”
Polimice said Samuel soaked in every ounce of knowledge he provided and quickly mastered a grueling daily routine the coach cultivated for him in the summer of 2023.
Every day was a full-body workout. No lower-body or upper-body nonsense. Polimice made sure Samuel’s entire body was on fire after each session.
Dumbbell jumps, back squats, single-leg split jumps and plenty of drills to improve Samuel’s hip mobility — the two spent all morning pushing each other to complete their reps. Then they’d eat lunch before parting ways, since Polimice had to serve clients at his personal gym. Samuel would usually conduct another solo workout during this time. In the evenings, he’d rejoin Polimice for a 6 p.m. workout session, averaging 2-3 workouts per day.
“There was never a time we weren’t working out together,” Samuel said.
Other days, they’d hit the grass and work on Samuel’s change of direction at cornerback, or Polimice would have him run sprints to bolster his stamina for a two-way workload. They’d even watch film together, honing in on Samuel’s pre-snap identification of man versus zone defense.
Polimice hardly refers to himself as Samuel’s trainer. Most of the time, he says, Samuel pushes him to get out of bed in the morning. It’s an “iron sharpens iron” dynamic Polimice hadn’t experienced before with another player.
“He was getting a step ahead of the game because he was working extra while everybody else was just relaxing,” Polimice said. “He was doing two-a-days every single summer, every offseason. He’s a person who’s never satisfied.”
Demetres Samuel stands alone during Syracuse’s Spring Game. Samuel joined the Orange for spring workouts, an early introduction before his potential stardom this season. Leonardo Eriman | Photo Editor
By the end of his junior year of high school, Polimice forged Samuel into a lean 6-foot-1, 190-pound weapon who could outrun speedy receivers and muscle his way through brawny linebackers. It wasn’t a difficult archetype for Benson and his staff to find a role for.
Defensively, Heritage created a position for Samuel’s skillset called the “warrior,” former Heritage quarterback Jackson Summerall said. Roaming between safety and cornerback, Samuel completed whatever the most aggressive possible assignment was on any given play, whether that’s playing man coverage on a No. 1 receiver or blitzing a quarterback in a late-down situation.
In 2023, his first season at Heritage, Samuel racked up five interceptions and 19 solo tackles while primarily playing defense. By his second and final year with the program, rival quarterbacks wouldn’t even bother to test the dangerous waters of Samuel Island — he didn’t nab a single pick as a junior.
“He was always going to make a big play,” Benson said of Samuel. “Nobody could run around on him.”
Samuel’s awe-inducing track numbers and ability to swarm the field defensively inspired Benson to mold him into a two-way player. At the end of Samuel’s sophomore year, he got sporadic run on offense, acting as a gadget deep-ball receiver. He caught six passes for 106 yards and two touchdowns, which led to an increase on offensive snaps the following year, where he totaled over 300 receiving yards.
On the first ball Summerall threw to Samuel in the 2024 season, they connected on a go-route, and the receiver housed it to the end zone. For the quarterback, that exact play happened countless times throughout practices and games.
“I could throw the ball as far as I wanted to,” Summerall said of when he targeted Samuel, “And he would always go get the ball. He’ll make it look so easy.”
He evolved into a human cheat code. Midway through his sophomore season, Benson figured he might as well send Samuel out to return a punt. On Samuel’s first-ever high-school punt return, he weaved through the opposing defense and brought it back for a touchdown. In Heritage’s 2024 season opener, Samuel delivered another punt-return touchdown in the school’s 44-0 win over Palm Bay.
“His first step of explosion off the ground is crazy,” Polimice said of Samuel’s punt-return ability. “He was destroying those kids.”
Benson said anytime Samuel steps on the field, you can see he’s the best player out there. There’s a palpable “aura” Samuel carries with him, Benson said, that attracts other teammates to follow his every move.
Samuel’s pull was so strong in high school that, after he reclassified from 2026 to 2025, virtually every upperclassman on Heritage’s program transferred out. Even Polimice moved to West Boca Raton High School as its football team’s DBs coach, a job he says he only received because of Samuel’s notoriety. Most teammates couldn’t bear finishing their careers at Heritage without Samuel, who they saw as an irreplaceable void.
“He always had a confidence that he’s the best on the field,” said Summerall, who has since transferred to John Carroll Catholic (Florida). “And that’s the confidence you want — you want your receiver to know that he’s the best on the field and as a defensive player, you want (the opponent) to know that no one is receiving any passes.”
On Brown’s first visit to Heritage to meet Samuel, he already knew all about the two-way’s oozing athletic potential. But he didn’t realize the teenage Samuel contains the brain of an NFL veteran.
Brown, Samuel and Benson began the meeting by breaking down game film. It was a way for Brown to test Samuel’s ball knowledge, but it quickly became more of a showcase. Samuel effortlessly analyzed every coverage of every play. After the meeting ended, Brown told Benson he’d never seen a player lead a film breakdown session until finding Samuel.
“That’s what’s going to continue to make him have success at the next level,” Benson said of Samuel’s IQ. “The game is very slow for him now.”
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When Samuel and Brown spoke on the phone about a Syracuse offer, the head coach presented the highly-touted recruit with a three-year plan.
He told Samuel he could play immediately at Syracuse, the first step of Brown’s mission to make Samuel an NFL Draft pick after his junior year. The goal is for Samuel to get selected in the first round of the 2028 NFL Draft as a 20-year-old. He would be one of the youngest first-round picks ever.
Even with Southeastern Conference giants like Alabama, Auburn and Florida — which churn out NFL players — begging for Samuel’s commitment, he saw Syracuse as a place where he could prove his value instantly.
Samuel and his family said Brown presented himself as “real” to them, offering guidance rather than a traditional recruiting “pitch.” He offered Samuel a future he couldn’t refuse, one where he’d grow into the face of the program.
“If you come here, you’re going to be the No. 1 player in the nation,” Brown told Samuel.
“After that first conversation, I knew he was different from everybody else,” Samuel said of Brown.
Polimice, who stays in touch daily with Samuel, traveled to Syracuse in late May to visit his prodigy. Samuel had started spring work on SU’s campus. Polimice said he watched a few drills the Orange’s defense conducted, mostly simple exercises going over fundamentals and learning about defensive coordinator Elijah Robinson’s secondary alignments.
When Samuel came over to greet Polimice, the coach could barely contain himself.
“Yo, you know you were like, prepared for this stuff already?” Polimice told him.
Samuel’s face lit up into a beaming smile.
“I already know, coach, this stuff is easy,” Samuel responded. “We’ve been doing this for the last two years.”
The great mystery surrounding Samuel is his everlasting quest of finding a challenge. Football has been too easy for him. There’s still plenty of time for Samuel to undergo the ups and downs of a typical player’s college career. Samuel is anything but a typical player, though.
For now, he remains limitless. Until he leaves, so is Syracuse.
Photograph courtesy of SU Athletics
Published on August 28, 2025 at 12:00 am