Avery Edwards — Quarterback, Class of 2031 — Stockbridge Middle School, Ellenwood, Georgia
The defense had something Avery Edwards had not seen before.
It was a nationally ranked matchup against DEA out of Texas, and whatever they were running was not in the book. Two quarters went by without an answer.
“It took me the first half to get a bead on what they were trying to do,” the Class of 2031 quarterback said, “but my coaches and I were able to decipher and make the adjustments.”
He picked that game as his most memorable, which is a choice worth noticing. He did not pick a blowout or a championship, and he has both available to him. He picked the afternoon he got confused and then stopped being confused — because in his own definition of the position, that is the entire job.
“You have to be smart and you have to be able to improvise well to be a quarterback,” Edwards said.
Two requirements. Neither of them is arm strength.
He has been playing since 5U, which is eight years now, and the sport was never presented to him as optional. The Edwards house is a sports house — his dad coaches, his mom played, and his older brother and sister have been competing his entire life. He grew up on a sideline before he ever stood on one.
What kept him there is the thing most players tolerate rather than enjoy.
“The challenge,” he said, when asked what he likes most about playing quarterback. “Every game is a challenge and every play is a challenge. That’s fun to me.”
The quarterback he follows is Josh Allen, which fits a player who describes his own game as smart and improvisational — Allen being the current standard for both the off-script play and the willingness to keep his eyes downfield while everything collapses.
The training is split deliberately in two. Ron Veal handles his field work. Coach 10 handles his board work. Mechanics in one room, football intelligence in the other — which is an unusually structured setup for an eighth grader, and it explains why his answer to a strange defensive look was to go decipher it rather than just start scrambling.
Two other names sit at the center of his development. Former Clemson running backs coach James Davis is one. The other is Anthony “Coach Tic” Jones, who has passed away, and whom Edwards still lists among the people who shaped his career. Some of what a young player carries comes from coaches who will never see how it turns out.
The résumé is already substantial. Edwards is a multi-time Battle and YNC national champion, a Born to Compete All-American, and has been named both quarterback of the year and offensive player of the year. The Seal and RNR Sports Media have him as the No. 1 dual-threat quarterback in the 2031 class.
None of that is what he lists when asked about his goals.
“To win our county championship and then compete to win a state championship is my first goal on the field,” he said. “I want to be an honor roll student in the classroom.”
A county title, a state run, and the honor roll. The national rankings are already his. What he wants is the thing his school can win and the thing he has to earn at a desk.
For the Edwards family
Avery’s best football story is not a highlight — it is two quarters of being puzzled, followed by an adjustment. That is the kind of thing that never makes a clip, never makes a stat line, and gets forgotten within a year unless somebody writes it down.
That is most of what an upgraded Quarterback Magazine membership does. It gives the parts of a career that do not show up on film a permanent place to live.
The upgrade puts custom QB Magazine graphics in his hands — designed pieces built around his name, his number, and his program, made to look the way published football material looks. For a player already collecting national honors across several circuits, graphics do something simple and useful: they make a scattered résumé read as one athlete, told the same way every time.
It also changes who sees it. When Quarterback Magazine shares an athlete’s feature and graphics across its platforms, that audience is not the one Avery already has. His followers are teammates, classmates, and the 7v7 and youth football world around Atlanta that has been watching him for years. Ours is trainers, camp directors, and coaches at the next levels up who have never seen a Stockbridge game.
The effect compounds. One graphic is a good weekend. A published feature, graphics through the season, and a profile that keeps growing turn into a body of work — so that a name that currently lives inside rankings lists becomes a name with a story attached to it. Class of 2031 is a long runway, and runway is worth the most to the players who start using it early.
And it lasts. Tournaments end, rankings get rewritten every year, and championship weekends blur together. What gets published stays published. Years from now, the record of an eighth grader who took a half to solve a defense and then solved it will still be there, in his own words, with the coaches who got him there named in it — including the one who is not around to read it.
More info: quarterbackmagazine.com/memberships