By eighth grade, McDonogh linebacker Wyatt Cook looked like a high school football player.
At 6 feet 1 and about 210 pounds, he had outgrown the Westminster Wildcats one year early. Disappointed to have to leave his youth football teammates, Wyatt didn't realize his season with the West Carroll Veterans, which did not have a weight limit, would put him on a path to the Big Ten.
In the Greater Baltimore Youth Football League's championship game, the Veterans played a perennially-loaded Hamilton team that always drew private school coaches scouting for talent. One look at Wyatt, his father and coach Wes Cook said, and scouts were "running up and down the stands" trying to find out who his mother was.
"At the end of the game," Wyatt said, "I come off the field and my mom, her hands were full. She had pamphlets, stuff from every single private school, saying to call them and keep in contact with them. That's when we knew I wasn't going to Winters Mill."
At McDonogh, Wyatt emerged as a two-time All-Metro and All-State inside linebacker and was The Baltimore Sun's Defensive Player of the Year as a junior. Wednesday, his Big Ten football career will begin when he signs a national letter of intent to play at Purdue.
By playing for the Eagles, Wyatt, 18, earned attention he otherwise might not have, but lost the opportunity to play at Winters Mill with his brother, Wes, who is two years older. A third-team All-State cornerback at Winters Mill, Wes tried to walk on on at East Carolina, but was cut.
Now, the two might get the chance to play together at Purdue. When Wyatt's recruiting started to pick up, their father figured why not see if Wes could get the chance to walk on wherever his brother went. Wes is now at Purdue working out with the Boilermakers and at 5-11, 185 pounds, will try to make the team as a safety.
"I pretty much put all my cards on him and put my future in his hands," Wes said of his brother. "We made sure that didn't play any part in where he would go, but if it was a school I could play at, it could benefit both of us and Purdue could not have been any better with helping me through this process. They treat their walkons like they're part of the team. I'm having a blast so far."
'Always a competition'
Although it will be an uphill battle for Wes to earn a spot on the Boilermakers' roster, the brothers would love to play together. They had that opportunity for only one year of rec ball.
Competitive all their lives, Wes said Wyatt would push him to get better and that Wes would "find a way to push his buttons" to help Wyatt improve, too.
"The way we grew up … everything was always a competition," Wyatt said. "We would always fight. Even now, it's, 'Who's the better brother?' or 'Who's the better athlete?' That's part of the reason I came back to wrestle (for McDonogh), because Wes got two state titles and I don't want to be the brother that only got one."
While Wyatt said it had to be hard on Wes to watch him play in such a high-level high school program as McDonogh, Wes said it didn't bother him.
"I never had the size to play at McDonogh, even my senior year," Wes said. "I went to every (McDonogh) game I could go to. I was never jealous. It was more like 'maybe my brother's going to be in the NFL.'"
The boys, and their two younger siblings, grew up watching Big Ten football. "Big Wes" Cook was an All-Conference nose guard at Division II Bloomsburg and passed that tough, hard-nosed style of football on to his sons when he coached them in the early years.
Wyatt embraced that work ethic, but said he might not have made it to Purdue had it not been for an injury during his sophomore season. He doesn't know how he tore the labrum in his left shoulder; he figures it must have been torn before the day he and teammate Syl Brown thumped shoulders in the hall and Wyatt's shoulder "just dropped."
An MRI revealed the tear, which required surgery and is usually followed by six-to-eight months of rehab. Wyatt needed just four months.
"That was when I started to become Wyatt Cook," he said, "because in my head at some point during my injury and my recovery I was like, 'All right, either I'm going to work my butt off to come back and be better than I was before or I'm just going to let this injury take me over and I'm just going to have to be a normal kid and not be able to play football.' Obviously, I took the high road and worked my butt off and came back in four months. Since then my work ethic, that's what I've been about."
That work ethic made Wyatt one of the top inside linebackers in Maryland. He played a key role in No. 1 McDonogh's back-to-back Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association A Conference championships (they shared the title with Gilman this past fall).
'Typical Big Ten linebacker'
At 6 feet 2, 245 pounds, Cook is well-known for his ability to cover from sideline to sideline and impact plays all over the field. He's also known for his coach-like preparation before games.
"He's a great leader on and off the field — weight room, preparation, video watching, understanding the scheme as good as the coaches, his motor, his tempo. He's got the whole package," McDonogh coach Dom Damico said. "He's a typical Big Ten linebacker. That's what he looks like and that's the way he acts."
Although he had good size going into McDonogh, Wyatt's recruiting was a little slow to pick up. His first offer came from Maryland in his freshman year, but it took months for the next one to come along. Eventually, he visited Maryland, Purdue, West Virginia, Penn State, Virginia and Pittsburgh.
For a long time, he thought he would go to Maryland, but he didn't commit and the Terps coaches eventually pulled the offer after receiving commitments from two other linebackers.
"I knew that was going to happen eventually, because I wanted to wait and they were pressuring me to commit," he said. "I wanted to see what my other options were."
Purdue offered him at the end of his junior year, but he didn't think too much about the Boilermakers until he visited the campus in Lafayette, Ind., last summer. He never expected the reaction he had to the program.
"I remember the car ride (to the airport) right when we left," Wyatt said. "It was just me and my dad and it was completely silent. We both knew that's where I was going to go to college and play football, but we didn't want to say it because it was so early. I still had a whole season of football to play, but I knew right away. I loved everything about it. It was just awesome."