The moment Evan Maruska stepped onto the bus, one thought ran through his head — and it had nothing to do with football.
“How am I going to talk to all these people and make friends?”
It’s an honest admission from one of the youngest quarterbacks on the 2026 College Bus + Camps TOUR. Maruska, a QB out of Phoenix, Arizona heading into the 8th grade, was about to spend seven days traveling through the Carolinas and Georgia with 38 other athletes, most of them older, all of them strangers. For a kid who trains year-round under nationally recognized QB coach Mike Giovando at Elev8QBAcademy, the throwing part was never the worry. The bus part was.
He’d signed up with a bigger picture in mind. “I wanted to get more experience and see what opportunities are out there,” he said. “I wanted to get a glimpse of being a college athlete for when I make my decision on college.” That’s a forward-thinking answer for an 8th grader, but it came packaged with an 8th grader’s expectations of what a week of college camps would feel like. “I was expecting it to be really hard and awkward. I thought they would work us into the ground.”
Reality surprised him. “It was a ton of fun,” he said. “It felt like a huge Gio Camp.” Coming from an Elev8 quarterback, that might be the highest compliment a week of football can earn — 11 college campuses that somehow felt like home.
The trip became real for Maruska the moment the bus rolled into North Carolina and he saw the size of the camps waiting for him. “Realizing how big the camps were when we got to NC — so many athletes,” he recalled. Hundreds of players from across the country, all chasing the same thing, all sharing the same fields. For a young quarterback from Arizona, it was the first true glimpse of the scale of the world he’s working to enter.
It was also in North Carolina that he found his favorite stop of the entire TOUR: Wake Forest. “Their head coach and all the coaches there had a ton of energy,” Maruska said. “They made the camp so much fun.” Plenty of camps run crisp drills. Fewer of them leave a 13-year-old talking about the energy of the coaching staff a week later. Wake Forest did.
Not every stop was kind to him. Charlotte tested him in a way no drill sheet could have predicted. “Charlotte camp was rough,” he admitted. “I strained my hamstring.” A strained hamstring in the middle of a seven-day, multi-state tour, far from home, surrounded by older competition — that’s the kind of adversity that sends some young athletes to the back of the bus for the rest of the week. Maruska kept going.
And maybe that’s why the words that stuck with him most all week came not from a position coach or a trainer, but from Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney. Asked for the single best piece of coaching he received on the TOUR, Maruska didn’t mention footwork or arm angles. “When Dabo Swinney told us to be the first person in our family to do something different,” he said.
The message clearly took root. By the end of the week, Maruska was talking about his future like a recruit twice his age. “I learned I need high grades to play at a great school,” he said. “I need to be a leader on and off the field.” Seven days on a bus, and the recruiting picture had come into focus: it’s not just about the arm. It’s the transcript, the leadership, the whole athlete.
Of course, the TOUR isn’t only camps and coaching points. The hundreds of miles between stops have a way of producing the memories nobody plans for. Ask Maruska for the funniest moment of the week and the answer comes fast: “When people were making AI-generated images of ‘Sensei Woo.'” You probably had to be there — which is exactly the point. Thirty-nine athletes boarded that bus as strangers. Somewhere between the inside jokes and the late-night miles, they became a team. The kid who worried about making friends ended the week with a busload of them.
So what did Evan Maruska learn about Evan Maruska? “No matter what, anything is possible,” he said. “I can do what I put my mind to.”
His advice for any younger athlete on the fence about the 2027 TOUR is as direct as a quick slant: “Don’t be scared. Go and have fun!” And his parting words sound like they come from a TOUR veteran, not its youngest QB: “Make sure you cherish the whole TOUR. Be grateful for the opportunity to be a part of something so awesome.”
He got on the bus wondering how he’d talk to anybody. He got off with a hamstring war story, a charge from a national championship coach, a sharper vision of his future, and the unshakeable belief that anything is possible.
Class of 2027 TOUR athletes, take note — the youngest guy on the bus just set the standard.
Evan Maruska is a quarterback from Phoenix, AZ, and trains with nationally recognized QB coach Mike Giovando at Elev8QBAcademy.