ALL-AREA FOOTBALL: Perkiomen Valley’s Rasaan Stewart is Player of Year

By Don Seeley
dseeley@pottsmerc.com

GRATERFORD – After Scott Reed went through three different quarterbacks in three seasons at Perkiomen Valley, he and assistant coach Rob Heist were determined to find someone, preferably an underclassman, to be a work-in-progress and, hopefully sooner rather than later, the centerpiece of their offense for two or three years.
While sitting through rain and unseasonably cold temperatures to watch one of their junior high school team’s games two years ago, a very athletic Rasaan Stewart caught their collective eye. But Stewart was a tailback.
The following day, both Reed and Heist met with Stewart and asked him to throw the football…
“It was horrible,” Stewart recalled. “I wasn’t using my legs, just all arm. I couldn’t even throw a spiral.”
“We were impressed watching Rasaan run the ball, and we had running quarterbacks before,” Reed explained. “We thought he’d fit (that role), and Heist thought he could teach him to throw the ball.”
Reed and Heist, as well as everyone else on the Perkiomen Valley staff, thought right.
After learning his new position and leading the Vikings to a winning season as a sophomore, Stewart came back this past season looking like — and, more important, producing like — a veteran quarterback.
Stewart ran for 1,210 yards and 21 touchdowns, and completed an area-high 61 percent of his passes that added up to another 1,636 yards and 12 touchdowns. All that despite missing one game with an injury … and all that despite anchoring the defensive secondary at safety and contributing a team-high 97 tackles.
“The expectations got a little higher a bit quicker than I thought,” Reed said of Stewart — The Mercury’s 2012 All-Area Football Player of the Year. “In 10th grade he did some nice things, but he was a better runner. He was in a little over his head at times, though, and he was feeling his way out.

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