Next week, Tolland High School football will play in its first state playoff game since 2007. The Eagles earned the spot in Class SS with a win over E.O. Smith in the final week of the season. Leading the way: senior captain AJ Cady.
“He’s one of those kids who can play just about anything and do just about anything that you ask of him,” Tolland head coach Alex Backus said. “He’s a captain for a reason, they can count on him when they need him.”
The thing about Cady is he was never one of those guys who always planned to be a football player.
“I played when I was younger for five years and then I stopped playing and I picked up golf,” said Cady, who is also on the Tolland golf team. “But I picked up football sophomore year.”
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See, the thing about Cady is if he’s going to do something, he’s going to put his whole effort into it.
Going to the field for hours with other friends,” Cady said. “It’s nonstop, it’s every day.”
That is, every day between balancing his senior year classes and his own businesses, plural.
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“I started the landscaping part of it years ago then recently…window cleaning,” Cady said. “It’s great because I can hire my friends as well.”
It’s a senior year and season that seems just as it should be. It’s the kind of senior year and season, that would make any parent proud.
“Before or after games I’ll think about what he put into the Tolland Eagles. The entire team, the entire community and I’ll use that to remember my purpose,” Cady said.
He’s talking about his dad, Scott Cady, though he was “Coach Cady” to most. And AJ’s purpose? Being the next Cady on the football field in Tolland.
“It was really great to be involved in everything because I’d just go to the practices, I was super young, be water boy, ball boy,” Cady said of growing up around the game with his dad.
But he never got the chance to suit up for his dad in high school, Scott Cady passed away when AJ was in eighth grade after a hard-fought battle with cancer.
“He was, he could get a little,” Cady paused, “He would yell sometimes but in a good way, in a good way,” he added with a smile.
Backus coached alongside Cady for a number of years and would agree.
“He was the fiery Irish guy and I was a little more laid back and trying to think about the analytics and I think AJ kind of got a little bit of both in what he’s doing,” Backus said.
When it comes to “Cady” on the football field, the last name is hardly the only similarity.
“A little of the craziness that my dad used to have,” Cady said.
“Yes,” Backus said with a laugh. “Scott, he loved the game and he loved the contact and we're like, ‘look AJ you don't have to hit everybody on the field,’ you can sometimes go around people.”
But the thing about AJ Cady is he’s Scott Cady’s son, and that is just what Tolland football needs.
“It’s that I want to carry on what he also did on the field,” Cady said. “Try to be that leader of hard work, that example that he once was for me.”
