The Make-A-Jake Foundation

SAMMAMISH — The Heaps family has all this stuff, stuff filling boxes and bags that are scattered among bedrooms they don't want you to see.

For two months, they've lived in this new home, and they meant to put this stuff away. But then their only son had to go to Las Vegas, and then New Orleans, and then to a camp in Tacoma, and now it's football season, so they can just about forget about it. The stuff will have to wait until December.

"It's been a wild ride, to say the least," Kelly Heaps says.

A year ago last Sunday, her son, Jake, made his first start at quarterback for Skyline High School. She cried when he completed his first pass and almost threw up when his team held on against mighty Bellevue with a last-minute stand. Her son was a varsity quarterback, and when she hugged him after that game, her tears still flowing, she thought this had to be as good as it gets.

It got better. And it has gotten crazy.

Heaps led Skyline to the Class 3A state title last season, finishing with a "did-that-really-happen?" comeback against O'Dea in one of the most exciting championship games in state history.

And in the wildfire world of college recruiting, Heaps took off from there. Before he has taken the first snap of his junior season, Heaps has more scholarship offers than any player in the state. Eight scholarship offers were faxed to the him Monday, the first day schools can put an offer in writing, and five more are expected this week.

A week ago, Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis left a practice early to chat with him. Florida, Louisiana State and even the Ole Ball Coach in South Carolina have all but begged the 17-year-old to visit. (To which mom says: "Put a scholarship on the table.") The family keeps every letter and every postcard in a folder as thick as the Bible.

As his mom opens the folder in their living room, and letters spill out, Heaps laughs. If cars ran on laughs and smiles, Heaps could solve the energy crisis.

"I pretty much have the two best secretaries in the world," he says.

Secretaries? Kelly and Steve Heaps are more like the CEO and CFO of the Make-Jake's-Wish Foundation, which has never let time, money or mileage get in its way.

When Jake came home from his first Skyline game captivated by the school's pass-happy spread offense, the family moved from Fall City to Sammamish to get within Skyline's boundaries.

After Jake first met quarterbacks coach Greg Barton — and got back in the car screaming, "He gets me! He really gets me!" — the Heaps drove 3 ½ hours to Portland 25 weekends a year so Jake could work out with Barton.

"They have always had my best interest at heart," Jake Heaps says of parents. "No matter what I ask. If I said, I want to quit football and start playing band, I guarantee you the next day they would buy me the top band equipment I needed to succeed."

Kelly Heaps never knew much about three-step drops, play-action passes or hot routes. But when she watched Jake throw in the first grade, with his pads hanging all over him and his helmet sagging on his shoulders, she knew this much: He didn't pass like the other kids. They heaved. He zipped.

"Mark my words," she told her husband, "this little boy is supposed to be a quarterback."

"I didn't believe her," Steve Heaps says.

Barton, who runs the Barton Football Academy, remembers his first workout with Heaps, and it wasn't because he was any more athletic than any other fifth-grader he'd worked with in the past 20 years.

Instead, Barton remembers the kid's eyes. Barton couldn't escape them; Heaps followed his every shift and sopped up every word.

"Everything I was saying, I could tell he was taking it in," Barton says. "He's one of the most coachable kids I've ever been around."

Heaps thought about footwork and technique constantly. After a training session, he couldn't wait to tell his parents about the new skill he learned. And when he couldn't perform a drill exactly right, he'd get in the car crying. His parents would catch him practicing that drill in front of a mirror. Failure, even on such a subtle level, killed him.

"You're talking about a kid who's highly driven," Kelly Heaps says.

He worked with some of the Northwest's top quarterbacks — among them New York Jets backup Kellen Clemens, former Tennessee starter Eric Ainge and California starter Kevin Riley. He learned so much from those workouts, absorbing all the good things those older quarterbacks did and learning from those mistakes.

Meanwhile, Kelly and Steve were learning, too, about how to put their son's film together for recruiters, how to talk with coaches and what camps he should attend. They would rave to parents about all they'd learned, but they often heard whispers in the stands with a common refrain: "They're pushing their son too hard."

They wanted to point out that Jake was the first one to the car every weekend, that heaven forbid they hit a traffic jam that made them late, because to Jake, missing even part of a training session was the end of the world.

"Parents would always say, 'You guys are nuts,' " Steve Heaps says. "Maybe we were nuts. But at the time, all Jake wanted was to get better at playing quarterback."

Says Kelly: "He's the one who pushes the train around here."

That train finally pulled into Skyline two years ago, and Heaps hoped to show immediately that he belonged with the varsity. But in the first game with the freshman team, he broke his fibula.

"I remember him going into the bathroom, he locked the door, and he completely broke down," Kelly says.

Greg Barton called him that night, and they talked for hours. Barton told him, "Jake, this is real life now." And by the time Heaps hung up the phone, he understood. He was talking about how he would get back before the season ended.

When Barton hung up, he turned to his wife and said, "He might only be a freshman, but I was just talking to a junior."

Heaps did return during his freshman season — only to throw five interceptions in his first game back. Regardless, Barton said coming back "was a real life lesson for him, to see that he was mentally tough enough to overcome something."

He won Skyline's starting spot his sophomore year, and in that debut against Bellevue, threw a 60-yard bomb to longtime friend Gino Simone for the game's only touchdown. Only in the third quarter did he realize he wasn't wearing his rib protector.

"The biggest thing was that Bellevue threw a lot at him, and he didn't force anything," said Mat Taylor, who was named the new Skyline coach this offseason, after Steve Gervais joined the staff at Washington.

Heaps threw for 3,103 yards and 31 touchdowns last season, 18 of them to Simone (who recently committed to Washington State). But it was the season's dramatic championship game that made Heaps the summer's recruiting darling.

Early in the third quarter, Skyline trailed O'Dea 28-7, and Irish back Johri Fogerson was running all over the Spartans. So Heaps, who threw an early interception, ran up and down the sideline, screaming about belief, about heart, about hope.

"Jake was one of those guys that never put it out of his mind that we were going to win," Simone said.

Gervais would later call it one of the best games by any quarterback in his 31-year career. Heaps finished with 287 passing yards and helped lead four touchdown drives in the final 20 minutes of a 42-35 victory.

There's a framed picture, with his mom and dad on Jake's right and his sister on his left, taken in the Tacoma Dome after that win. It's on a built-in bookshelf in the living room, along with a signed football from that night and a team picture.

In their new house, this small shrine was just about the first thing the family unpacked.

Jokes Jake: "We had that up before we brought in the furniture."

Tom Wyrwich: 206-515-5653 or twyrwich@seattletimes.com