The Epic Adventure of Euclid Cummings
Knights DE Takes Unlikely Road to Football Stardom
By Tim Altork / STAFF
Here’s a tale about the family Cummings. It’s your typical “high school student takes a 45-minute bus ride to school every day, lies to his parents about playing football and then becomes one of the most sought-after defensive ends in the country” kind of yarn. It centers around an 18-year-old young man, the youngest of three Cummings boys who has quite suddenly become the latest crush of the SEC recruiting bigwigs as a member of the Centennial Knights.
Only, he doesn’t live anywhere near Roswell, has only been playing football for a year and is named after an ancient Greek mathematician.
So stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Born Ready
Patricia Cummings has her son Euclid’s best interests at heart. It’s important to understand that right from the outset.
This protective instinct was in place from birth when her husband wanted to name their third child Caesar. It would have been well within his rights because Patricia and her husband (also named Euclid) had made a pact that if the baby was a boy, Euclid would name him. And if the baby was a girl, Patricia would have the honors.
So daddy Euclid strolled into the hospital room shortly after his son was born and told his wife the name that he had chosen.
“He said ‘Caesar.’ And that didn’t go too well with me,” Patricia recalled. “I didn’t like that name, but also I had agreed that his father would name him if it was a boy. So I said, ‘I have to be creative about this.’”
So, even in her recovering state, she turned on the charm and lovingly suggested that the new baby’s name be a combination of the parents’ names. So Euclid Patrick was agreed upon as the boy’s moniker.
Patricia’s knack for creative compromise would not be lost on young Euclid, who years later would put ink to paper and create a pact of his own that would help change the lives of the Cummings family forever.
A Long Road to Travel
The Cummings live in the southwest corner of Fulton County in the Westlake school district. As Euclid was working his way through elementary school they grew increasingly concerned about the quality of education that the area offered, so they looked for a way to get Euclid and his older brother into a better situation.
“He’s from south county, but he’s not from the south county you’re thinking of,” said Centennial head coach Jeff Measor. “He’s got a nice house in a nice little neighborhood. It’s just a long way from here.”
Patricia came across Fulton County’s Majority to Minority program in which any student who is in a racial majority in their current school district can transfer anywhere in the system where they would be a minority. So Euclid got into the Centennial pipeline when he began attending Haynes Bridge Middle School.
Every day since the start of seventh grade Euclid has taken a 45-minute bus ride to school in the morning, and another to get home at night. If he misses the bus he takes MARTA, which generally makes the trip take even longer.
“Yeah, it gets old,” he says.
The obvious question is, why doesn’t he just drive himself? And the obvious answer is, he doesn’t have a license. And there’s a good chance his mother wouldn’t turn him loose on the I-285/Ga. 400 speedway even if he did.
As Euclid progressed through middle school he took up basketball, and by the time he was in the tenth grade, he had sprouted to 6-foot-3 and appeared to have a bright future in the sport.
But his size and athleticism caught the eye of the football coaching staff, and they started to nibble on Cummings’ resolve to be a one-sport athlete. The only problem was that Euclid was locked into basketball and his mother wanted no part of a two-sport life for her son.
“I didn’t want him to play two sports because I feared that his academics would suffer,” she said.
The logic was impeccable. Why send him 40 miles away to school if he’s not going to put in the time to take advantage of his academic opportunities?
But for Euclid that logic was only as impeccable as his intentions of remaining solely a basketball player. In the summer between his sophomore and junior years at Centennial, Euclid began participating in the Knights’ football conditioning program behind his mother’s back. He explained his absence from home by telling his parents that he was going to basketball practice.
The covert operation lasted as long as the summer, but at the orientation for the upcoming school year it all came crashing down on Euclid. He was attending the event with his mother when an assistant coach came up to both of them and let the cat out of the bag.
“The coach said, ‘Oh, I’m happy that you’re joining football,’” Patricia recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Football? What football? He’s not playing football.’”
Not surprisingly, Euclid got an earful in the car on the way home. “I told him that he couldn’t play,” Patricia said. And that would have been the end of it. Euclid would have had a solid career as a bit player on a loaded Centennial basketball team, then graduated and then rummaged for financial aid for college just like 98 percent of his graduating class.
But Euclid, like his mother over 17 years before, took matters into his own hands. He wrote a three-page letter to his parents apologizing for lying to them and explaining how important football had become to him. And he included a contract addressing his mother’s deepest concern. Essentially it said, “No grades, no football.”
Patricia’s initial reaction was to dig in her heels and deny the inspired request. But Euclid’s father intervened.
“I read the letter and was still like, in my mind, ‘No,’” Patricia said. “But then my husband said let him play.”
“At that point it really made me step back and look at it as, this is something he really wants,” she continued. “Because sometimes as parents we really think we’re doing the right thing, and I’ve learned one thing. You have to listen. So at that point that’s what we decided to do.”
‘Like Hitting the Lotto’
Since then things have taken off for Euclid. He’s maintained a B average in school and even took extra classes this summer to put himself in a better position academically heading into college.
But on top of that he has become the darling of college coaches throughout the Southeast. Measor has taken him to college after college so he can show off his rare combination of size and speed.
He’s received a dozen Division I scholarship offers, and counting, from the likes of Georgia Tech, Maryland, South Carolina and Mississippi State.
It’s a brave new world for Cummings.
“Of course I like the attention,” he said. “But at the same time I don’t want to get too excited.”
And all this has come despite the fact that he only has one year of experience playing organized football. But Measor says that he’s been a natural from day one.
“The first time he did a tackling drill he just sort of bumped into somebody and the kid fell over,” Measor said. “He just kind of looked around and didn’t really know what was going on.”
As for Patricia, she couldn’t be more excited to have been wrong about letting her son play a second sport.
“It’s like hitting the lotto,” she said of the free ride through college that Euclid is virtually assured of. “I’m just so grateful. My feet still haven’t hit the ground.”