Marty Gordon
NRVsports@ourvalley.org
A member of the Eastern Montgomery High School’s football team will continue his playing career at Bluefield College. Matt McClernon signed a letter of intent Friday in front of friends, family and coaches.
Matt McClernon (center) is an Eastern Montgomery High School senior football player who has signed a national letter of intent to play at Bluefield College. Pictured are: (left) EM Coach Jordan Stewart and Matt’s father, James McClernon (right).
The 6 foot tall, 195-pound linebacker has led Eastern Montgomery in tackles for the past two years.
“They welcomed me during my first visit and made me feel like it was home,” he said about Bluefield and he hopes to major in physical therapy.
McClernon will join a Bluefield Rams team that includes several other local players and even a former teammate. Charles Nwaihesie played at Christiansburg, and Alan Bowen is a graduate of Auburn High School. Trevor Brown is a freshman running back from Eastern Montgomery.
Bluefield College teams are part of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), primarily competing in the Mid-South Conference for football, and, since 2014, in the Appalachian Athletic Conference (AAC) for all other sports.
Bluefield fielded a football program from 1922–1941, but had not had a football program since then.
Coach Dewey Lusk ,a native of Christiansburg and a 1981 graduate of Christiansburg High School, is only the tenth head coach in the school’s history and the third since the program was reinstituted in 2012.
He comes to Bluefield from Webber International University (Babson Park, Fla.) where he served as offensive coordinator in the 2016 season.
From 2011-15, Lusk was head coach at UVa-Wise, where he helped guide the Highland Cavaliers in the transition from an NAIA program to an NCAA Division II school. He was associate head coach and offensive coordinator at UVa-Wise from 2005-10.
During his stint as the offensive coordinator, Lusk helped UVa-Wise become one of the most vaunted offensive juggernauts in NAIA football. In 2008, the Cavalier offense finished fourth in the NAIA in scoring offense (41.4 ppg) while finishing second in the nation in pass efficiency (174.9) and total offense (477.5 yds./gm).
Lusk was offensive coordinator at Emory & Henry College from 1991-2005 and was an assistant at Abingdon High School (1990-91), Gardner-Webb University (1987-90) and a graduate assistant at Gardner-Webb (1985-87).