Shaon Berry, Founder and CEO
Junior Rank/JuniorRank.com
After more than 18 years as a Human Resource Executive, Shaon Berry decided to merge two of his life’s passions – the desire to be entrepreneur and junior athletics. Berry, who also has a strong background in fiance, operations, sales and marketing, and who played running back at the University of Pittsburgh saw the need to establish a credible authority in evaluating young athletes in grades 6 thru 9. Drawing on his academic experience from the University of Pittsburgh and Cornell University’s executive management program, Berry enlisted the help of former teammates as well as college and professional players and coaches, and formed Junior Rank in early 2009. Junior Rank is an athletic organization and on-line entity dedicated to evaluating, recognizing and rewarding great student athletes while giving parents the tools, resources and opportunities to help fulfill their son’s and daughters dreams of playing college sports. Starting with football in 2009, with plans to expand to basketball, baseball and softball in 2011, Berry and his team organize junior football combines and All-Star showcase events throughout the country continuing to reinforce the importance of character, discipline and academic excellence. Berry, a father of three, has developed a customized on-line scouting (1-5 Diamond Methodology) that evaluates and ranks young athletes across the country based on their individual event performance, personal statistics, seasonal highlight videos, community service and academic standing.
His mission: Developing tomorrow’s role models today by effectively profiling, evaluating, recognizing and appropriately rewarding the nation’s top junior student athletes in every sport across the nation.
Randy Taylor
NCSA Football Recruiting Coordinator
Randy Taylor, has nearly 30 years experience in the college football recruiting arena. Taylor graduated from the University of Illinois where he was a 3 year letterman and All-Conference Honors recipient. Following his collegiate career, he went on to join the football staff for the Fighting Illini. After that successful stint, which included a Big Ten Championship and a Rose Bowl appearance, he became the recruiting coordinator at UNLV.
Taylor also served at UCLA, where, after landing several nationally ranked classes (a #1 ranked class included), he was named the nation’s top recruiting coordinator by ESPN.com and high school football recruiting analyst, Tom Lemming. He most recently served as the Director of Football Operations for the University of Minnesota.
As NCSA’s Football Recruiting Coordinator, Randy Taylor is proud to join forces with JuniorRank team as a Diamond Bowl Scout to help identify top recruits across the country and to provide his evaluation along with video, transcript and testing numbers to Division I football programs.
Tom Lemming
Nation’s Top Football Recruiting Analyst
Tom Lemming, a Chicago native, got his start as a stringer for suburban Chicago weeklies covering high school football games. In 1978, he began scouting football prospects, logging his findings in a newsletter he circulated to college coaches and fans alike. Tom Lemming was called “the mailman” as he delivered information about the best recruits to hundreds of college coaches and football fanatics by personally interviewing and scouting players from coast to coast. He continues his delivery by evaluating 1,200 of the top football recruits every year in his prep football tour, powered by NCSA. By traveling 50,000 miles from December through June with his tour, he diligently and tirelessly produces the Tom Lemming Prep Football Report, considered by many to be “the bible” of college football recruiting.
He joined College Sports TV (CSTV) after spending decades as the leading preps analyst for ESPN. Lemming has written for ESPN, USA Today and Sporting News and currently has his own show, “Tom Lemming’s Generation Next,” on CSTV. Lemming also assists with the annual selection process of the top football prospects to participate in the US Army All-American Bowl Game and Combine hosted in San Antonio, TX.
Today recruiters still visit his home during the May evaluation period to watch film on players from across the country. Michael Lewis, author of The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game recognized Lemming as the “only national football scout in America.” To this day, Tom Lemming remains one of the leading experts on college football recruiting and high school talent and is ready to bring his experience to JuniorRank as a Diamond Bowl Scout along with NCSA’s Football Recruiting Coordinator, Randy Taylor.
