At 6-foot-7 and nearly 290 pounds, Grant Treiber is the biggest person in just about every room he ever enters. And that’s pretty much how it’s been his whole life.
“I’ve always been a head taller than everyone else,” said Treiber, who’s just wrapping up his junior year at Lincoln High School. “In junior football I was always a ringer.”
“Ringers”, in junior football, are players deemed too big to carry the ball (a red stripe is taped in a ring around their helmets), limited to a life of blocking and tackling as lineman. But as he enters the summer before his senior season, Treiber appears well on his way to taking full advantage of his overgrown stature.
The offensive tackle has garnered scholarship offers from 10 Division I colleges from all over the map, and expects to pick one soon. Once that’s out of the way, Treiber can focus on helping the Patriots dig out from a rebuilding effort that saw them win just two games last season in coach Jared Fredenburg’s debut season as coach.
Within the last month, Treiber has received offers from Missouri, Oregon and Vanderbilt. He already had offers from Liberty, Eastern Michigan, Iowa State, North Dakota, North Dakota State, South Dakota and South Dakota State. Many others have expressed interest.
“It’s pretty exciting,” said Treiber, who’s currently in the midst of track season, where he throws the shot and disc for Lincoln. “I try and have fun with it, not let it overwhelm me and try to keep a level head. I’ve talked to my coach and my parents and I think by the end of July would be a good time to make a decision. But it could come earlier and it could come later, I guess. I’m looking for a place where I’ll feel like part of a family. I don’t want to be just another player. The biggest aspect to me is the relationships with other players and coaches.”
When Fredenburg took over the Patriots after the 2016 season (coming over from Roosevelt, where he’d been the Rough Riders defensive coordinator), Treiber was coming off a sophomore season that had been interrupted by an arm injury. His size was intriguing, but he’d yet to start using it.
“He was definitely a large human being, but his arm was in a sling and I didn’t really know what I had,” Fredenburg said. “All I had was his sophomore film, and frankly it wasn’t too impressive.”
Still, based on size, Fredenburg saw parallels with former Roosevelt tackle Grant Schmidt, who went to Ohio State out of high school and now plays for South Dakota State. In a one-on-one conversation, Fredenburg told Treiber he could have a Division I future himself if he put in the work. Soon after, he did.
“He really got my attention when June came around and we started our offseason workouts,” Fredenburg said. “He really bought in.”
