‘A great leader to be behind’: Dixon’s Eli Davidson is Player of the Year

The stats don’t tell the whole story about Eli Davidson.

Sure, the Dixon senior recorded more than 100 tackles for the second straight season. And yes, he did amass nearly 900 yards of offense as a slot receiver for the Dukes.

But that only scratches the surface as to how big an impact Davidson had for the Class 4A quarterfinalists over the past two seasons.

It’s the intangibles that make Davidson stand out even more as the 2024 Sauk Valley Media Player of the Year.

“Eli, you can’t say enough positive things about the kid,” Dixon coach Jared Shaner said. “He’s a really, really special kid, and a really, really good football player on top of that. He really deserves this.”

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Davidson’s love of football started early, fueled by his father, Josh, a former player for the Dukes in the late 1990s. His maternal uncles, Peter and Adam Love, were also talented athletes who played for the Dukes in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

Some of Davidson’s earliest memories revolved around football.

“Football’s been in my family my whole life. My dad knows everything about football, and he’s taught me everything I know,” he said. “He had me crawling routes before I could walk, so it’s been a Day 1 thing for me, for sure. I stopped playing soccer when I was 6 because that’s how old you had to be to play football. I remember my dad asked, ‘Are you sure? Do you want to wait?’ and I told him that I couldn’t wait. I ran out of the car to go to practice from the first practice on, and I fell in love with it. I knew I couldn’t go through life without having that be a part of it.”

Even early on it wasn’t offensive glory that drove Davidson. As the biggest kid on the field growing up, it was always hitting and tackling that got him excited.

“I kind of just fell into being a linebacker,” he said. “When I was younger, I was a lot bigger than everybody else, but the coaches didn’t want to put me at lineman because I was still fast. If I didn’t make weight, which happened sometimes, I played D-line, but if I made weight, I moved back to linebacker, and that position just kind of came natural to me.

“And, I like when the guy lines up across from me and looks at me wrong and I can take it out on him and not get in trouble for it.”

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Davidson’s sophomore season was memorable for all the wrong reasons. In Week 2 of his second year on varsity, he suffered a season-ending injury to his left knee.

“I tore my ACL attempting to make a tackle against North Boone, and I didn’t know,” Davidson said. “It didn’t feel right, but it wasn’t horrible pain, so I kept playing. I played on it for basically a quarter, then I blitzed a little later and my meniscus blew, and that’s when I went down and knew it was serious.”

It was a crushing blow for Davidson. He kept lobbying doctors and trainers and coaches to let him play on it “just a little bit,” and he’d sneak into practice reps and run routes before being shooed away. The Dukes had a game a few days before his surgery, and Davidson asked the doctor if it would do any more damage if he just played on it one last time before getting it repaired; it was a no-go.

But as tough as it was for the competitive Davidson to be forced to sit out, the injury provided some long-term value.

“It changed my perspective, it changed everything, from future plans to what you’re going to do the next day,” he said. “I have more appreciation for just going to practice or going to weightlifting at 5:30 in the morning – you usually might not want to do that, but I had to miss out on a whole year of that, so I took those things a lot more seriously. It just changed the way I looked at everything. I always had a good work ethic, I thought, but [the injury] changed the way that I attacked every day. It made me realize that you can’t waste a second, because it could be gone.”

That renewed love for the little things, the urgency to make the most of his time on the field and in the weight room, was evident to Shaner and his coaching staff.

“He’s had a lot of ups and some downs throughout high school, the injury being the main one,” Shaner said. “You know, sometimes you have to go through those difficulties to really appreciate the positive things. Eli is an extremely hard-working kid, but he’s also had natural ability, and typically when he got on the field or the court or the diamond, he was the best kid out there. So for him to have to sit out that sophomore year was very difficult for him, and I think it did make him appreciate it even more.”

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It wasn’t just the ability to play the game he loves that was affected by the injury. Not a naturally loud guy, the hard work Davidson had to put in work not only to rehab the injury but also get back to being an elite player provided an impressive example for his teammates – which helped him grow as a leader, a role he wasn’t always comfortable in.

Already known around the Dixon program for his high football IQ, he poured even more work into the cerebral side of the game while he was physically unable to play.

“Growing up, I knew I wasn’t going to be the fastest kid on the planet, or the biggest or tallest,” the 5-foot-10, 205-pound Davidson said. “My dad always told me, ‘Control what you can control – and you can control your attitude and effort.’ So I kind of took that attitude toward leadership. If I can understand the game mentally better than the guy across from me, even if he’s physically better than me, if I understand what’s going on better than he does, I can still make that play.

“So that sparked the leadership, trying to get other people to understand the mental side of the game, and that kind of just naturally put me into a leadership position. So from there on out, I’m calling the plays, I’m getting us aligned, and if you’re doing that, everyone’s going to look to you for direction. So my coaches, from the start of high school, saw the intelligence part and looked to me to take on a leadership role. I liked it, but I didn’t have a choice, it was just part of it.”

Shaner and his staff relied on Davidson to be an extra coach on the field. He served as defensive coordinator Tyler Mattison’s eyes and voice on the field, and Shaner called him “one of the more heady high school athletes I’ve ever coached; he just gets it, understands things on both sides of the ball.”

His teammates also came to rely on Davidson once they got between the lines – and that didn’t go unnoticed by the coaching staff even more.

“It’s great because it feels like the coach is on the field with you. Eli knows what he’s doing and he’s really great at what he does,” said junior Jake Whelan, who learned the ropes at linebacker beside Davidson. “He brings a lot of a lot of good energy, keeps us up when we make a bad play, and he can really calm me down. Eli played a huge role in me learning all the defense, all the calls, what everyone does. He’s a great leader to be behind.”

“For him to kind of take Jake under his wing this year and just, number one, making sure everybody’s in the right spot, and then teaching Jake what he’s seeing through his eyes, Eli’s leadership was the part that really impressed me this year,” coach Shaner said. “We’re certainly going to miss him next year, no doubt.”

That trust from teammates and coaches helped Davidson play even faster.

“It just gives me even more confidence. I know that if all the coaches on the staff have their full trust in me to go out and set us up right and go make a play, then I have no reason to doubt myself, thinking that I can’t do that,” Davidson said. “Once they were fully on board with giving me the keys to call things out there, it really helps your confidence and you play even better on top of it.”

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Defensively, Davidson finished this season with 118 tackles, including 51 solo, and also added 10 tackles for loss, two interceptions (one of which he returned for a touchdown), a forced fumble, and a fumble recovery to earn honorable mention All-State recognition. That came after a junior season where he recorded 148 tackles (74 solo), 10 TFLs and three forced fumbles, with one recovery.

“He’s one of those players where he can diagnose an offensive formation and play, just an extension of Coach Mattison on the field,” coach Shaner said. “He was our best football player, but he’s not a ‘rah-rah’ guy, out at practice yelling and being loud. He’s not getting up in front of the team and giving speeches, that’s not who he is. But he’s the leader. There’s no question. Everybody knew that.”

But it was on offense where Davidson made a huge jump this season. The Dixon coaches purposely didn’t play him much on offense most of last season as they eased him back from the knee injury, but he still finished with 22 catches and nine rushes for 301 total yards. In their second-round playoff loss to St. Laurence, Davidson made tough catch after tough catch, keeping the Dukes in it until the end – and setting the table for this season.

Theis fall, he was the security blanket for first-year quarterback Cullen Shaner, who took over the reins of the offense from his older brother Tyler after spending two seasons as a wide receiver. Davidson led the Dukes with 59 catches for 791 yards and 14 touchdowns, and added 97 yards and two scores on 11 rushing attempts.

“We just developed so quickly out on the field with each other, especially for receiver to quarterback, and being able to have him as my No. 1 guy was just so easy. If there was a play that needed to be made, I knew I could just get him the ball and he would make that play,” said Cullen Shaner, who threw for 1,971 yards and 30 touchdowns and ran for 527 yards and seven scores as a first-team All-Stater. “When you have four, five, six athletes that you can just get the ball to, and they’re going to make plays for you, just take it and do the dirty work for me, it’s easy. Especially with Eli, he was able to get that done day in and day out, at practice and during the games.

“We put our minds together a lot, we were always just on the same page, and we knew it was going to be a good outcome. Even if he was getting double- or triple-teamed, I still trust him over anybody else. That’s the connection we were able to have.”

That connection helped the Dukes to a 10-2 record – with a 543-131 scoring edge, scoring at least 35 points in 10 of their 12 games, and 51 or more six times. A 29-28 loss to Byron on a late two-point conversion in their Week 8 game and a 20-13 loss to Coal City when late fourth-quarter drive came up short in a 4A quarterfinal were the only blemishes.

“Eli was where we went to when we needed a big play, even when the defense knew where the ball was going,” coach Shaner said. “We talked about that, and even in our playoff games, we had conversations, Cullen and Eli and I, where that was it: ‘Cullen, if you get in a jam, you know where to go with the ball. And Eli, do what you do, go make plays,’ and worst-case scenario, it’s an incompletion and we live to play another down.

“Being able to get him the ball in multiple ways as a slot receiver was the best option for us, and he proved that with so many catches and runs.”

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As special as the on-field exploits were for the past two seasons – Davidson was a key cog in Dixon’s 19-4 record and three playoff wins in 2023 and ‘24 – those won’t be his lasting memories.

As he decides where he wants to take his football talents to the collegiate level next year, the things that jump out to Davidson don’t have anything to do with stats or specific plays he made this fall.

“My favorite part has got to be the bonds you build,” he said. “You don’t make relationships like this anywhere else. You’ll make relationships in class or in the workplace, but nothing like on a football team. It’s just different. You’re never going to find anything like that, and going into it with bonds like me and Cullen had, me and Tyson [Dambman] or any of the guys, you grow closer to people than you can imagine. Those guys have got your back and you’ve got theirs.”

And it’s the bond with the Shaner family that stands out the most. The coach and his sons became like a second family for Davidson, and it started from Day 1.

“When we got to town eight years ago, for whatever reason, Cullen and Eli became best friends,” coach Shaner said. “He was one of the first boys that Cullen ever spent the night at his house or he came to our house, and they’ve just been best friends ever since, and they’ve had a connection, not just in football, but just in general as high school kids, and sort of watching them grow up and play sports together has been really fun for me, really cool as a coach and a dad.”

As special as it is for the head coach, Davidson enjoyed it just as much – and appreciated it even more.

While it’s sometimes hard to realize just how special something is while it’s happening, Davidson made sure he took the time to understand exactly what it meant.

“We’re all brothers, and then almost literally me and Tyler and Cullen are brothers. I mean, I’ve basically lived at their house for years, and Jared’s taken me in just like I was one of his. We’ve spent endless hours together doing whatever, whether it’s football or not. I think that elevates our game on the field,” Davidson said. “I’m not going to lie, half the time I didn’t run the route I was supposed to, but Cullen just knew that if this was the coverage, I’m not running my route – and he knew where I was going to be and he hit me with passes plenty of times.

“It was special; there’s nothing more fun than going out there with your best friend, and me and Cullen felt invincible out there. If something’s going wrong, we’re standing in the huddle looking at each other thinking back to the backyard in fifth grade, ‘Let’s go make a play and have some fun.’ At the end of the day, it’s a game, and we got to play with each other – and you can’t ask for anything more than that.”