Ready to sign

Salem sack master Rogers ready to embrace life-changing experience as he prepares to sign with Temple

By Al Muskewitz
Riverview Sports News

SALEM – The phone buzzed in Antwuan Rogers’ pocket during Tuesday’s mid-morning rush. On the other end of the line was his Temple recruiting contact Malachi Timberlake, just checking in again with the Salem senior, but this time to make sure everything was still on track for Wednesday’s red-letter day.

“‘Are you ready,’” Rogers said, recalling the conversation. “’Your life changes tomorrow.’”

Indeed. First thing Wednesday morning Rogers will sign with Temple to play Division I football. He’ll enroll in January and participate in spring practice to get a jump on his freshman college season. And he plans to come back to walk with his graduating class in May.

It’s a day he’s dreamed about since he was a ninth-grader sitting in the auditorium watching his senior teammates do exactly what he will be celebrating Wednesday afternoon in front of friends, family and teammates. He was too young to understand the enormity of the day when Salem’s record-setting future NFL All-Pro Jonathan Taylor signed with Wisconsin in 2017, but the implications of what he’s about to do really hit home that day as a freshman.

“When I saw that I was like I can’t wait to do that,” he said. “They all knew where they were going to college, just about everything they worked for was happening for them and I just felt happy to see it. It made me realize I had to work harder to get there.”

And that’s what he did.

He said the summer between his sophomore and junior year was “the hardest I ever worked in my life.” Early-morning workouts, nap, practice, work out again. Whatever it took.

It paid off in what he called a “good” junior season for a winless Salem team and it got him invited to the All-American Game in Texas that winter – just a few months after K.C. Keeler was named the Temple head coach — an experience he said “opened me up as a person.”

He’d never been outside the Delaware Valley area before and the flight to Texas was his first ever, but the moment he stepped on the plane it hit him that “this is what football can do, it can change my life like this.”

And then he impressed in the workouts and the game.

“At first even though I was nervous around all these people who were tops in the country and have all these offers and you go in with the butterflies like any other game, but I held my own,” he remembered. “I did my thing with the top guys. I was like I could be considered a top guy.”

In Rogers, the Owls are getting a fierce 6-foot-5 pass rusher who made his bones terrorizing opposing quarterbacks this season. He recorded 23 sacks, breaking the single-season school record that had been his goal with a beastly single-game record eight against KIPP in the opening round of the South Jersey Group I playoffs. He finished the year with 98 tackles and 28 career sacks

Although he had interest from two other major programs, the Owls were always high on his list. He went to “a lot” of Temple games growing up, knew a lot of their players and when he finally went there on a visit it all felt so familial.

Timberlake was calling Tuesday morning just to make sure it still felt that way. He’s ready.

“It’s the day that’s everything I worked for,” Rogers said. “Sometimes you get unmotivated, you see a lot of guys getting offers around you and you don’t have any, (but) you just keep your head down and keep working.”