Hamilton’s Dakota Shelton waits to take the field during the Hornets’ 23-13 loss to Notre Dame Sept. 20, 2014. (Photo by Albert Rende.)
To watch junior Dakota Shelton play middle linebacker for the Hamilton West football team, it’s hard to believe that his first time on the field resulted in tears.
And not tears of joy, either.
Shelton was in fifth grade, playing his first Pop Warner game for Hamilton. He was lined up at middle linebacker, and the opening play was a run right at him. The ball carrier blasted him, Shelton went down and quickly wanted out.
“That first play, I got cracked,” he said following a standout performance against Notre Dame on Sep. 20. “I cried, I didn’t want to do it.
“I think it was against New Egypt. I just took the blow, started crying. I went up to the coach and said ‘Coach I don’t want to do this no more.”
“My dad was on the other side of the fence. He got my dad over there, and my dad said ‘No, you’re finishing up. If you don’t like it, you can quit after.’ They wanted me to finish out the season, and if I didn’t like it then I wouldn’t do it, but I ended up liking it a lot and going through with it. I had to have a better mentality and fight through it.”
No one is happier about it turned out that than Hornets coach Tom Hoglen and defensive coordinator Mike Folis, who rewarded Shelton with a starting berth as a sophomore and are secure in the fact they have one of the finest linebackers in Mercer County.
“He’s a natural linebacker, Hoglen said. “He’s a weight room kid, he loves to be there. Kids get with him in the weight room and bust their buts with him. And you’ve got Reidgee DiManche and Zach Harding, two sophomores at linebacker right next to him. You’ve got one senior in the front seven the first two games of the season.”
Which meant that Shelton was a grizzled veteran in just his second year on varsity.
“He’s a leader on defense,” Hoglen said. “You don’t get to say that too often about a sophomore or a junior, but he’s a special player and he plays hard.”
Once he decided to stick with football, Shelton was moved to a few different places on the field, but linebacker was always his home.
When he came to Hamilton, he lasted two games on the freshman team before being promoted to JV.
“That was exciting getting called up,” he said. “And it was a really good experience getting to play on the JV.
“I was kind of nervous coming in as a freshman, but I’m nervous before every game so it’s not something new. But I knew it would be the same thing, the kids would just be bigger, stronger and faster. I just had to toughen up and stay with it.”
Entering his sophomore season, Shelton knew he had a chance to make varsity, but wasn’t leaving anything to chance.
“I knew I had to work, I wasn’t going to stroll on in there and just get a position,” he said. “I would have to fight for a position, hit the weight room, run, just work out.”
After he was named the starter, Dakota worked even harder.
“Then I had to prove myself that I was meant to be a starter,” he said, “and that I wasn’t a little coward.”
It’s safe to say no one thought that, as Shelton was on pace to set the single season school record in tackles before a concussion sidelined him for a one game and “kind of set him back,” Hoglen said.
“I didn’t even know I was on pace to set a record,” said Shelton, who finished with over 90 tackles. “Then I got the concussion and missed the Hightstown game. After that I was fine. I just had to keep my head up. I had a problem with keeping my head down. I got my bell rung (on the concussion). And he was a big boy, he wasn’t small at all.”
In the off-season, the coaches worked a lot with Shelton on his pass drops in order to prepare him for college.
“You have to work on your weak points more than your strong points,” Hoglen said. “He worked hard in the off-season on drops and he’ll work on speed in this off season. He’s a tough nut in everything he does.
“He did a little too much dropping back (in a loss to Princeton), so we had him coming more straight ahead (against Notre Dame), and he made a lot of tackles. He’s a hard-nosed kid, he has a nose for the ball.”
Shelton admits that pass coverage “is one of my downfalls,” and he understands he needs to work on it. But he will admit that his favorite part of playing linebacker is getting into the fray and making hard tackles. The kind of tackles ball carriers remember.
“I love hitting people, I love watching them hurt,” he said. “As bad as that sounds, it’s the game of football. You hit them hard first, and they’re either gonna be scared of you or they’re gonna fight back. If they fight back, you gotta keep on hitting and trucking along.”
Shelton has become a student of the game. He prefers watching college football over the NFL game, as he feels it’s more exciting. But he is not just kicking back with a soda and some chips and worrying about the score.
He studies the teams and what they do with the linebackers. He watches the reads, the steps, the angles, and pays attention to what offenses do with their fullback in order to neutralize a linebacker.
And he has learned that although it makes for great footage on NFL Films, he can’t just run amok like a mad man when a play develops.
“I have to stay patient,” he said. “You can’t just go in there, running into people, taking on blocks. You need to have good moves, know what you’re gonna do.
“You need to be strong and you need to be fast and agile. You need to get by the lineman quicker because linemen are only so fast in high school.”
That is becoming a bit more difficult this year as Shelton is finding himself double and triple teamed.
“It’s a little harder,” he said. “I have the tackle coming after me sometimes. You need to depend on your linemen a little more.”
But rest assured those linemen are depending on Shelton as well, and rightly so. Once he dusted himself off after taking his first hit, a ferocious linebacker became unleashed.
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