How Travis Hunter Changed The Way We Look At Two-Way Athletes
When I started covering high school recruiting back in 2014, the model was simple. You identified a prospect, you assigned a position group, and you built a recruiting pitch around that. If a kid could play cornerback and wide receiver, you said he was a CB who occasionally lined up outside. You did not recruit him as an athlete who could change the geometry of your entire roster. Then Travis Hunter happened, and the whole framework cracked. The conventional path to a D1 scholarship looks like this: you excel in a single position at the varsity level, you play at an elite camp, you get rated by the services, and a program offers you based on positional need. Hunter's path through Florida Atlantic as a junior college transfer to Jackson State and then to Colorado defied every step of that pipeline. He was not a blue-chip recruit coming out of high school. He was a late-bloomer who played wide receiver in high school, transferred to a junior college, and then forced his way into a two-way role at the FCS level before becoming the most unusual offensive and defensive weapon in the 2023 college football season. What that means for high school coaching and recruiting is more practical than dramatic. It means your evaluation framework needs to account for two-way potential as a standalone trait, not a footnote. Programs that only rate athletes by their primary position are missing revenue-relevant roster pieces. Hunter proved that a single player occupying two roster spots can shift how a coach structures a depth chart for an entire season.
I ran into this directly about three years ago with a junior college transfer who was a dominant edge rusher but also had legitimate speed on offense. Our recruiting database classified him purely as a defensive end, and three Power 5 schools passed on him because they did not have an opening at DE. We reclassified him as a two-way athlete in our internal notes, highlighted his special teams value, and re-engaged the recruiting leads who had already moved on. Two of those schools came back with offers once they saw him as a depth-chart solution rather than a positional filling. It took about forty-five minutes to restructure the recruiting file, and it cost us nothing except the assumption that one label stuck. The uncomfortable part is that this approach does not scale cleanly. Not every two-way prospect is a Travis Hunter. Most are not. When you start evaluating kids as two-way athletes, you introduce variables that mess with traditional recruiting projections. A cornerback who can also play receiver will naturally line up in different run fits, which changes how scouts grade his tackling. A two-way player accumulates different injury risks, different recovery timelines, and different film breakdowns depending on which role he is in on any given week. If you are grading a prospect, you have to separate his production by role, not lump it together. Otherwise you end up overvaluing a kid because his combined stats look impressive even though neither position number is actually starting-caliber. Another thing people miss is the academic and roster arithmetic behind the two-way model. A true two-way player counts as one scholarship but occupies space that would normally require two roster slots. That sounds like a resource multiplier until you factor in practice squad limits, NCAA count rules, and the reality that most two-way players need positional reps on both sides of the ball to stay sharp. You cannot just put him on the field for forty plays and expect him to maintain technique at an elite level. In my experience, the kids who sustain two-way success do so because they develop a shared skill set across both positions, not because they treat the roles as separate jobs. Footwork on coverage transitions feeds into route-running cuts. Leverage and hand usage as a pass rusher translate to press coverage technique. When those shared fundamentals align, you get a player like Hunter who makes sense on both sides. When they do not, you get a guy who is mediocre everywhere and useless in crucial moments.
For high school coaches trying to replicate this path, the first decision is whether you are building a program that accommodates two-way athletes or whether you are optimizing for position-specific excellence. These are not always compatible. A prep program that wants to produce NFL-caliber specialists typically separates kids early and runs parallel offseason curricula for offense and defense. A program that wants to create multi-role contributors keeps the roster smaller, emphasizes football IQ over specialized repetition, and accepts that individual positional statistics will look worse than they would in a specialization model. Neither approach is wrong. They just produce different outputs. The recruiting side is where this gets tricky in practice. Service ratings still dominate the conversation at the high school level, and those ratings privilege single-position production. A kid who records twenty catches and ten tackles for loss in a season will look less attractive to some evaluators than a kid who records forty catches and eight tackles, even if the first kid provided more total strategic value. I have watched coaches spend entire off-seasons trying to push a two-way prospect into a single position simply to make him more marketable, and most of the time it backfires because the kid loses the versatility that made him interesting in the first place. There is also the question of timeline and development curve. The Hunter model requires patience. He was not a proven commodity until his third year of competitive football at the collegiate level. Programs willing to develop two-way athletes need to accept that the first year will look messy. The second year might improve but still show gaps. The third year is where you typically see whether the shared skill set has actually synthesized or whether the kid is just burning out from divided focus. If you are a high school coach thinking about this path for your roster, plan for at least two years of adjustment before you evaluate whether the model is working.
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From a practical standpoint, the tools you need to track this kind of athlete are straightforward. Maintain separate stat lines by role. Track practice repetition counts for each position to monitor fatigue and technique maintenance. Keep a film log that notes when performance dips on one side and whether it correlates with increased load on the other. Most recruiting databases do not have clean fields for two-way tracking, so you will likely end up building a simple spreadsheet outside the standard system. That extra work matters because it prevents you from making the common mistake of using aggregate production as the primary evaluation metric. The limitations are worth stating plainly. The two-way model does not work for every athlete, obviously. It does not work well at the highest professional levels where specialization is extreme. It requires a coach who is comfortable managing complex roster decisions and who can communicate clearly with recruits and parents about a non-linear development path. It also depends on having enough institutional support for recovery and sports medicine, because two-way players stress the body differently than single-position players, and injury risk is real if you do not manage load carefully. If your program lacks depth, a two-way athlete can actually help cover roster gaps during a short season. If your program has resources but you cannot commit to the development model, you are better off sticking to the traditional specialization path. There is no benefit to half-implementing this approach because it creates confusion in both recruiting and on-field preparation.
The broader takeaway is that Travis Hunter's path forced a conversation that recruiting services have not fully resolved yet. The infrastructure for rating two-way athletes exists in a fragmented way across platforms, and most high school coaches are still adapting. The programs that figure out how to properly evaluate, develop, and recruit multi-role athletes will have a structural advantage in the next cycle. The rest will keep trying to fit square prospects into round rating boxes and wonder why they keep missing on guys who turn out to be more valuable than their profile suggested.
