Warren senior running back Aaron Stewart’s prolific high school football career just ended, and the emotions were raw.
As had been the case so often during his three varsity seasons, Stewart squeezed every last yard out of his body Saturday night. But the Illinois recruit’s thoughts during several minutes of solitude after the game kept coming back to the other seniors on the team.
“I’ve had a great high school career, so I can’t be mad,” Stewart said. “I’m going to get a chance to put on another uniform. But for a lot of these guys, this is the last time they’ll ever put on pads. I have to think about the big picture here and support my teammates instead of dwelling on myself. That’s what I’m going to go and do right now.”
Stewart’s hard-driving running style almost single-handedly kept the fifth-seeded Blue Devils within striking distance against 12th-seeded Bolingbrook in a Class 8A second-round playoff game in which they never led. But Stewart was more concerned about helping his teammates process their 20-14 loss.
“He does everything you’d ever want,” Warren coach Bryan McNulty said. “We’ve had great players here, great running backs, but he’s the best we’ve ever had in the school’s history and the best player I’ve ever coached. He’s a coach’s dream.”
Coaches everywhere dream about having 2,000-yard rushers, and McNulty has lived it. Stewart’s 237 rushing yards against the Raiders raised his season total to an almost unthinkable 2,871 yards, and he already had at least 567 more yards than any other rusher in the state. The two touchdowns he scored gave him 46, also the most in the state this season.
Perhaps the 5-foot-7, 185-pound Stewart’s most defining metric is his 337 carries for the North Suburban Conference champion Blue Devils (9-2) this season. He had 42 attempts against Bolingbrook (9-2), and he looked as fresh as could be on every one of them, including his last, which resulted in his second 15-yard touchdown run with 1:01 left. But it’s a heavy load.
“You just can’t let that type of stuff get to you,” Stewart said. “It’s just the way I was raised, the way I grew up. It has nothing to do with sports. It’s just the way I think. I do what I need to do in the classroom, I do what I need to do on the field and I do what I need to do on the mat.”
Indeed, Stewart is also a nationally ranked wrestler and a two-time state champion. He intends to do both sports at Illinois.
That competitiveness pushes Warren senior left tackle Jordan Ellis, a North Dakota commit.
“He fights for every single yard, and that motivates me to block harder,” Ellis said. “If he’s running for his life, I’m going to put everything I’ve got out there. The goal is to do my job the best I can, but knowing that if I slip off or if I miss my block, I know he’ll still make me right and he’s still going to get a positive gain.”
That is Stewart’s focus when he runs the ball, whether he’s scratching out a yard when a hole doesn’t materialize or going for a home run once he gets to the second level unscathed, like he did on a 35-yard jaunt early in the second half on Saturday.
“I’m always going to keep pushing,” Stewart said. “As the game goes on, it always gets harder. We didn’t get a score in the first half, but we put up two in the fourth quarter. With a minute left on the clock, I still believed we could win that game. That’s always how I’m going to think.”
On the Blue Devils’ final drive, which began with just over five minutes remaining, Stewart kept getting the ball, even though time wasn’t on their side in their bid to reach the state quarterfinals for the fourth straight season. But with Stewart still picking up yards in a driving rain, that was probably the most effective way to move the ball.
“Especially since we knew what the weather was going to be, coming into tonight, I knew what it would look like,” he said. “I’ve been on the big stage hundreds of times, and I don’t always come out on top, and stuff like this happens. You live, and you learn. We figured it out in the second half, but it was a little too late.”
Steve Reaven is a freelance reporter.
