ALBANY HERALD FOOTBALL PLAYER OF THE YEAR: Aubrey Solomon had monster season for Lee County

LEESBURG — Sabrina Caldwell gave her son Aubrey Solomon an option when it came to playing football.

“He had two choices,” she said. “I told him either he could stay at home and I was going to drive him crazy or else he could decide to play.”

Of course, Solomon chose the latter.

As a four-year starter on the Lee County High School football team, Solomon dominated the game and earned The Albany Herald’s Football Player of the Year award.

The 6-foot-3, 305-pounder finished the season with 77 tackles, 12 sacks and 16 tackles for losses to help Lee County to the second round of the Georgia High School Association Class AAAAAA state football playoffs. He also added 18 quarterback hurries and 18 big hits.

“I was just picking up where the seniors before me and the seniors before them left off,” Solomon said. “Next man up, that’s what we do here at Lee County. It was my time to ball out, so I knew I had to do it. Next year’s class is going to do the same thing.”

Lee County coach Dean Fabrizio marveled at some of the plays Solomon made this season.

“Aubrey is a big guy who has a lot of flexibility, especially in his hips and ankles,” Fabrizio said. “A lot of bigger guys can’t bend and play like that. Aubrey just has that natural leverage.”

Rarely did an offensive lineman get the best of the senior standout. In a nonregion game against Thomas County Central earlier in the season, Solomon was virtually unblockable and spearheaded a defensive effort that limited the Yellow Jackets to negative rushing yards.

But his play in a sack of Houston County quarterback Jake Fromm in which he forced a fumble, recovered it and took it 20 yards for a touchdown in a 55-29 rout of the then-top-ranked Bears made its rounds on social media.

“First touchdown of my football career felt pretty good,” Solomon said after the game. “I just had to catch (Fromm) off guard on that one.”

The five-star defensive tackle is uncommitted and recruiters will have a field day in January trying to sway the massive defensive tackle to sign with their school on National Signing Day in February. Solomon at first committed to Michigan after a satellite camp last summer was held in Leesburg, but ESPN reported that Solomon decommitted after Michigan officials sent him a thank-you letter for attending a BBQ recruiting event that Solomon didn’t attend.

According to Scout.com, Solomon has Alabama, Michigan, Georgia, Auburn, Florida and Southern California among his finalists.

STIFF RULES

Solomon is the middle of five children that Caldwell raised as a single mother. Extra-curricular activities were important, but none ranked as high as excellence in the classroom.

One of her daughters recently graduated magna cum laude from Florida A&M. Her oldest son, Alex, played football and signed a letter-of-intent in 2015 to play college football at Albany State before transferring to Avila University in Kansas City, Mo. He recently told his mother that he was going into the Navy.

Caldwell said she learned her wisdom raising children as a single mother from her father, who raised five kids of his own as a single dad.

“He always taught that without an education, you weren’t going to go far,” she said.

Caldwell was in the Navy and. after service, she lived a short time in Arizona and California. Aubrey’s first sport was soccer, and she served as the coach. He later experimented with T-ball and baseball before deciding he liked football the best because, as his mother described, “he likes the impact of crushing somebody.”

He always had good size, so his nickname as a 5-year-old recreation football player in Arizona was “The Punisher.” After they left Arizona and moved to California when Caldwell got a job working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Aubrey was nicknamed “Bone Crusher” and “Freight Train.”

The family moved to Leesburg when Aubrey was in fifth grade after his mom took a job working at Marine Corps Logistics Base-Albany. The Lee County football program was struggling. Aubrey liked the school and his friends, but he wanted no part of the football teams.

“I’m not going to lie,” he said. “I thought about moving somewhere. It was that bad. But I was tired of moving because my mom was in the military, so we used to move like every year. I was tired of moving and I had just started making friends in Lee County.”

If Aubrey wasn’t going to play football, he certainly wasn’t going to sit at home and play video games after school.

“Kids have so much energy and they need to use it,” Caldwell said. “But mom has a lot of rules. I used to make them read and do book reports. I used to tell them to go read the first three chapters and give me a synopsis of it.”

While Aubrey was growing and developing his mind, he complained about the struggling Lee County football teams. Finally, Caldwell had enough.

“You know how kids talk and stuff, but I told Aubrey to go be the one to make a difference,” she said.

Along the way, Aubrey learned some lessons on the field, such as how to win and lose. Since he had never been on a losing team, he didn’t take getting beaten too well.

When he was 10, he played for the Bulldogs in the Lee County Recreation Department. He was a sought-after player even the recreation coaches fought over. His team struggled and lost all of its games. Sometimes, they were beaten soundly.

“We had to tell him that sometimes things aren’t always going to go your way,” Caldwell said. “When the team picked you, they were looking to you as an anchor, looking at you as a leader.”

After the winless campaign, Aubrey couldn’t believe he was selected to be an all-star.

“We told him that it shouldn’t matter whether you won all the games or not, it mattered how well you played,” Caldwell said. “That was a turning point for Aubrey, which helped make him humble.”

DEVELOPING AND WORKING

A different Aubrey continued to work and dominated in middle school, then he started as a freshman at Lee County in 2013. Fabrizio believed he could be a special player.

“We knew in middle school that he could be pretty good,” Fabrizio said. “He was always big and always moved well for a kid that size. He started as a freshman, which is pretty rare here.”

Solomon was part of a defense that helped the Trojans win the Region 1-AAAAA title and make the second round of the playoffs, then he helped Lee make the postseason as a sophomore in the ultra-competitive Region 1-AAAAAA, then the state’s largest classification.

Meanwhile, he continued to work and develop.

‘We knew he had a lot of ability,” Fabrizio said. “But we didn’t know he was going to be the best defensive lineman in the country. While he had a lot of natural ability, he put the hard work in over time. There are a lot of players who have potential and don’t pan out, but he was one of those that through hard work, his potential became a reality.”

LOOKING BACK

The 2016 season ended for Solomon when they lost to Mays in the second round at Atlanta’s Lakewood Stadium. The senior hasn’t slowed down, entertaining college recruiters who are eyeing his next move.

He’s tired but excited for the future. He said this past season was a memorable one.

“We fell a little short in the playoffs, but it was more than I really expected,” he said. “My team really showed up big-time to play big ball. I’m not disappointed. I wouldn’t change anything. Everything was worth it.”

Solomon will leave Lee County as perhaps the best defensive player to come through the school. He will have one last high school event when he plays in the United States Army All-American Bowl on Jan. 7 at the Alamodone in San Antonio. While he’s excited, leaving Lee County will be bittersweet.

“It’s very unreal,” he said. “I’ve seen myself play high school football for a very long time. To see it come to an end is very sad. I’ve grown up here since fifth grade, I call Lee County my home. When I think of Lee County, I think of it as home. I wasn’t born here, but it feels like it … just where I was supposed to be.”

He doesn’t want to talk about recruiting. But one thing is certain — academics will play a major role in his decision.

“I want to get my degree from whatever college I go to,” he said. “That’s very important to me because I need that education. Education helps gets you very far in life. I want to know what I’m going to do 10, 20 years down the road, not just football. Football is going to be there, but I just want to get that degree and make my mama proud.”

An option Caldwell is glad to hear.