Ryan Murken

Your Prep Sports

IOWA CITY – Standing 6-foot-3 and weighing over 200 pounds with broad shoulders and a muscular physique Nathan Deyak looks every bit like a football player.

Surprisingly, at least based on his size, Deyak had never played football or even given the sport much consideration until halfway through his high school career.

Instead Deyak focused his athletic prowess on swimming during the winter months and as a thrower on the West High track and field team in the spring.

It was around the throwing rings, surrounded by teammates that doubled as linemen on the West High football team, that Deyak decided to take up football.

As a newcomer to the sport Deyak settled on long snapping as his way to make an immediate impact in his new sport.

“I’m a pretty big guy so I wasn’t worried about getting on the field too much but I knew long snapping was an important position and I thought this something I can be really good at,” Deyak explained. “All the other guys had spent so many years working to be an offensive lineman or a receiver or whatever but I knew I would be able to make progress snapping.”

To those that know him it came as no surprise that Deyak was a quick study on the football field.

Deyak has been excelling in the classroom since well before he arrived at West High.

He owns a weighted grade point average over 4.0 while loading his class schedule with college courses like linear algebra since his sophomore year.

Within a year of taking up long snapping Deyak became a stalwart in Trojans’ special teams units.

“He did a great job for us at a critical position that is often overlooked,” Hartwig said. “We talked about it in the summer and his body type is perfect for it and he is a dedicated, focused kid so it worked out well for him.”

Once Deyak decided to give football a go he worked relentlessly at his craft.

Over the summer he would go to a park near his house daily and work on snapping technique for 20 or 30 minutes.

That work ethic, along with his intelligence that helped Deyak score a 36 on the ACT in his only attempt at the exam, led to early success on the football field.

“He’s here early, he stays late, he listens, he remembers everything you say and he applies what he is told to do on the field,” West High coach Garrett Hartwig said. “That is a sign of his intelligence really.”

After spending most of his athletic career competing in individual events in team sports like swimming or track and field Deyak found an added element of athletics on the football field.

This season he helped West High to a 6-1 record, a top-10 ranking and a spot in the Class 4A quarterfinals.

“It’s a great team atmosphere,” Deyak said. “It’s nothing like quite like any of the other spots I’ve done. There is a team aspect in those but nothing like when you have 11 guys working together.”

Football isn’t in the future for Deyak who hasn’t ruled out competing in swimming or track and field in college.

He has applied to both the Massachusetts and California Institutes of Technology and is interested in mathematics.

“I’m not sure of my exact plans but I might do track or swimming at either of those places and major in math,” Deyak said. “I’m not 100 percent set but I’m pretty sure I either want to be an actuary or see how math works out.”

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