Blake Adams — Quarterback, Class of 2031 — Bumpus Middle School, Hoover, Alabama

The throw that tells you the most about Blake Adams is the one he would rather not talk about.

It came in an All-Star game. He put the ball where it should not have gone, a defender took it the other way, and he came off the field carrying the particular frustration of a quarterback who knows exactly what he did wrong. What happened next was somebody else’s decision. “The coach had confidence in me and put me back in,” Adams said.

“The next series I threw a 76-yard touchdown on the first play.”

First play. Not a screen to settle down, not a handoff to get the taste out of his mouth. Seventy-six yards on the snap after the worst moment of his day. That sequence — mistake, trust, immediate answer — is more or less the shape of his entire football life, and it explains why he talks about leadership the way he does.

Adams is a Hoover kid with the game in his blood. His father and grandfather both played college football, and he grew up around it long before he ever took a snap. Five years in, what he loves about the position has less to do with the ball than with the puzzle. “I have command on the field and control of the game, the challenge of figuring out defenses and how to beat the other team,” he said, before adding the part that most young quarterbacks leave off. “I enjoy being part of my team and being around my teammates.”

That last line is not filler. The hardest stretch of his career so far had nothing to do with his own play. “One of my biggest challenges has been playing on teams that weren’t successful due to injuries, lack of experience, and not understanding the game,” he said. That is a thankless situation for a quarterback — the position gets the credit and the blame regardless of what the eleven around him are able to do. He did not treat it as an excuse. “It made me step up as a leader and learn how to work through adversity and challenges. When you lose, it sure makes you appreciate the wins even more.”

The wins came. This past season he threw five touchdowns in a game, and his team won the Metro championship for the first time in several years. His short-term goal is to do it again in 2026, which is a notably unselfish thing to lead with when a questionnaire asks a quarterback what he wants. The individual ambition comes second, and it is a specific one: he wants to be working with the varsity program as a ninth grader.

The model he studies fits everything else about him. Not the biggest arm in history, not the most athletic quarterback to play — Drew Brees, and for exactly two reasons. “He was mechanically sound and extremely accurate,” Adams said. A kid who values figuring out a defense picks the quarterback who won by being precise.

The mechanics have been built with help. Adams credits Coach Galu Tagovailoa for his throwing mechanics, his footwork, and his confidence in the position, and he goes out of his way to name Curtis May, a youth coach he describes as a real mentor. Then, unprompted, he thanks his teammates. He trains with Raising Champions and has tested himself widely for a player his age — FBU, Future 4 Football’s hotbed camp, Under Armour Next, Elite 11, the Polynesian Bowl National Showcase and Combine, and college camps at Samford, Tennessee, and Alabama.

What comes through in all of it is that Adams understands the job as something done with other people. The quarterback who gets put back in after an interception is the one whose coach believes he will handle it. The quarterback who leads a program to its first Metro title in years is the one his teammates followed there.

Seventy-six yards on the first play back. He earned that ball before he ever threw it.

A Note to the Adams Family: What Upgrading Adds

Blake’s story keeps circling the same thing — people who believed in him at the right moment, and what he did with it. A QB Magazine membership upgrade works in that same direction. It is a way to make sure the work he is already doing has a place to live and a way to travel.

The most tangible piece is the custom graphics. Our design team creates player assets built around Blake specifically — his name, his class year, his school, his numbers — professional pieces made for posting and sharing. A five-touchdown night and a Metro championship are the kind of season that deserves more than a line in a group chat, and a clean graphic gives that season a form other people can pass along.

The second piece is reach. Upgraded members have their content shared across QB Magazine’s platforms, where the audience is coaches, trainers, camp directors, and people who follow a quarterback publication on purpose. Blake’s own following is family, teammates, and Hoover. Ours is the wider football world, and the difference between those two groups is simply how far his name gets to go.

What makes it worthwhile over time is accumulation. A single post is a good day. A feature, a set of graphics, and a profile that keeps growing through each season become a record — so that a name someone hears in ninth or tenth grade is already a name they have seen before. Class of 2031 is a long horizon, which is exactly what makes building steadily now so effective. There is no rush in this. There is just a lot of runway.

And it stays put. Seasons end and highlights get buried, but a published feature does not go anywhere. His profile lives at quarterbackmagazine.com/profile/blake-adams-79, and years from now the story of a seventh grader who threw an interception, got sent back out, and answered with seventy-six yards will still be there in his own words — with Coach May and Coach Tagovailoa and his teammates in it, right where he put them.

More info: quarterbackmagazine.com/memberships