Tuimoloau Willing to Wait as Long as He Needs Before Choosing College

Coach for top-rated football recruit from Eastside Catholic High School reiterates to Ohio website that the defensive end will continue to take his time in choosing a school.

With high school football rapidly changing its schedule from Washington to California to Texas, one thing holding steady is J.T. Tuimoloau's unhurried pace for choosing a college scholarship. 

The Eastside Catholic High School defensive end — a 5-star recruit widely considered the No. 1 or 2 player nationally for the 2021 class — still plans to wait out the pandemic as long as he can in order to take campus visits.

While he has offered very little publicly about his recruitment, his Eastside Catholic coach Dominic Daste told cleveland.com this week that Tuimoloau will take his time in coming to a final decision. 

There is no indication from him or his coach whether Tuimoloau will play his senior year in the spring season recently created by the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association to replace the abandoned fall slate. 

Ohio State, Alabama, USC, Stanford and Washington are schools that appear to have the best chance of signing the 6-foot-4, 277-pound defender, whose SI All-American evaluation profile can be viewed here. He has nearly 20 scholarship offers so far.

"J.T.'s a really mature guy and how many uniforms you have and all that kind of stuff is fun for him," said Daste, a former UW offensive guard from 1996-2000, referring to the personalized jerseys collected on visits. "But I don't think it's by far any stretch of the imagination of what's important to him. He obviously wants to have an outstanding football career and maximize his athletic ability, but he also wants to be a businessman and wants to do some things whenever football's done. He's trying to figure out which place is best in terms of that."

Surrounded by spotters, Tuimoloau recently was shown bench-pressing four reps of 365 pounds at Ford Sports Performance, a suburban Seattle-area workout facility. 

Earlier in the pandemic, Tuimoloau said publicly that he first wanted to visit Ohio State, Stanford and USC, but those trips didn't materialize when travel and social activities were greatly curtailed. He was able to attend a UW recruit-oriented meeting in January, but couldn't watch Husky spring practice as planned once it was canceled. 

He'd also intended to go to the Michigan-Washington and Ohio State-Oregon games that were scuttled when the Big Ten and Pac-12 each decided to play conference-only match-ups this fall.