If you saw Elyria High offensive tackle Isaiah Byler in action last season, you’d probably scoff when told you might not recognize him this year. After all, Byler stood 6-foot-5 and weighed nearly 330 pounds — the definition of standing out on a high school football field.

“I had a talk with him about losing some weight so Division I schools would take him seriously,” Pioneers coach Steve Hamilton said. “Isaiah went out and dropped 50 pounds, and he did it the right way — through diet and exercise.”

The weight loss was needed to increase Byler’s mobility and speed — issues many college scouts had after watching his junior highlight tape on ScoutingOhio.com. So Byler dropped the weight, hit camps across the Midwest and began getting calls from Division I coaches.

Hamilton said Colorado, Michigan, Ohio State, Michigan State, Indiana and all the Mid-American Conference schools inquired about his player, and Byler received scholarship offers from Marshall, Eastern Michigan and Bowling Green.

Byler visited Marshall and planned on visiting Eastern Michigan, but it was the middle trip to Bowling Green that ended his recruiting experience. He was so impressed with the campus, the coaching staff and the program, he gave the Falcons his oral commitment.

“It felt like home, yet at the same time you knew the coaches there are going to push you,” Byler said. “We talked to the players, we talked to the coaches and for the first time I got to meet P.J. Mahone, who’s a former Elyria High great, and he said he loved it there.

“Everyone was telling me all these great things about Bowling Green, so I decided I wanted to be part of it.”

The destination wasn’t nearly as amazing as the road Byler took to get there. While dreams of playing for a Division I college danced in his head after his junior season, he knew he really didn’t have the resources needed to turn himself into a prized recruit.

Then one day while sitting in class at Elyria, Byler got a text message from his youth pastor, Josh Kirksey.

“He asked me if I knew that (former Browns center) LeCharles Bentley had that camp going on in Avon,” Byler said. “I said, ‘Yeah, Josh, I know about that, but it’s extremely expensive and there’s no way I can afford that.’”

Byler received another text from Kirksey the next day, requesting a meeting with the player and his parents. The pastor laid out a plan where he would pay for the first six weeks of Byler’s training with Bentley, and worked out a deal with Bentley that if Byler showed promise, the former pro would pick up the rest of the tab.

“(Kirksey) said that someone helped him do what he wanted to do when he was younger, and he felt like he needed to do the same for me,” Byler said. “He believed that it would benefit me a lot, and it has. I’d like to keep him by my side — I have a really good supporting cast around me.”

Byler worked on everything with Bentley. They did Pilates, which Byler said significantly increased his flexibility, they did ladder drills to increase Byler’s hand and foot speed, they jumped “a lot” of rope and worked on techniques.

All of it was hard work, but it all paled in comparison to the difficulty of the diet Bentley concocted.

“I remember some nights I’d go to my friend’s house and they’d be eating steak and baked macaroni and cheese and baked beans … just all the foods that I loved,” Byler said. “All I could eat was the meat and the salad. It got to the point where I was constantly texting LeCharles and asking if I could eat this or eat that. It even got down to whether I could chew gum with sugar in it, and he told me, ‘No, you have to chew sugarless gum.’ ”

So Byler grilled chicken on his George Foreman grill and ate a lot of salads. He kept a big bottle of peanuts in his school locker to snack on, and said the rest of the space in the locker was filled with bottles of water he chugged between periods.

“I drank water, and ate meat and vegetables,” he said. “It was rough.”

But the weight came flying off, and he got faster and stronger.

“I’m not this big blob of fat running around the field anymore,” Byler said. “I went from about 26 percent body fat down to 18 percent. I was constantly working out. When I wasn’t working with LeCharles, I was in the weight room. When the weight room was closed, I was in the training room working on agility.”

It all paid off, and Byler is seeing the payoff.

“He definitely brings a lot of strengths to our football team,” Hamilton said. “He’s always been a real aggressive young man, with a little bit of a mean streak to him. But this year he came in and he actually looked like an athlete.

“In the 15 years I’ve been coaching, he’s probably the most technically sound offensive lineman I’ve coached.”

Contact Shaun Bennett at 329-7137 or sbennett@chroniclet.com.

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