Rico Smith has some rules for his household, one being that nothing gets taped to bedroom walls. There has been only one exception.

It’s been almost eight years since his oldest son came to him with a lofty desire. Having fallen in love with football, a young Brandon Smith told his dad that he wanted to grow into one of the best athletes his Virginia hometown had ever seen. He wanted to go to college on scholarship and eventually play professionally. Rico stopped him right there. “We have another rule in the house that you don’t talk about the NFL or anything beyond college,” he said.

Academics came first, but if Brandon was indeed that ambitious, Rico wanted him to put his intentions in writing. So Brandon penned a letter telling his future self to maintain good grades, to work diligently on and off the field and go to lengths that others refused. Most of all, he needed to prove wrong anybody who might doubt his dreams. He wrote it all down, tacked the paper on his wall by his bed and read it every day until he became one of the best high school prospects on the East Coast.

“He spoke it into existence at the age of 10,” Rico recalled. “He said one day, ‘I’m going to be the best football player to ever come out of Louisa County and I’m going to be one of the best football players in the entire country.’ ”

A few dozen scholarship offers later, Brandon Smith is set to begin his career at Penn State as an early enrollee. He’s the highest-rated defensive recruit in the Nittany Lions’ incoming freshman class, but it wasn’t easy getting to this point.

In order to assess Brandon’s commitment toward his goals, Rico challenged him in a variety of ways. He started by enrolling Brandon into high school courses when he was still in eighth grade. That summer, the younger Smith attended football camps meant for high school upperclassmen. The following year, he commuted to a military academy as a freshman, attending classes by day and working out at night in the most challenging environments the Smiths could find.

“I know this may sound crazy, but we put him in situations where he’s either going to pass or fail, and a lot of times we put him in situations to fail because we wanted, from an academic and athletic standpoint, to see how bad he wanted it,” Rico said. “We put him in a situation to fail, not to hurt him, but to [encounter] failure. If he was willing to work through it and to keep pushing, then we as parents were willing to provide the resources to achieve some of his goals, not knowing that it would be to the extent that it is now.”

The first sign that they were on the right track came from the head coach of Fork Union Military Academy, where Smith spent his first year of high school. Mickey Sullivan, who had previously tutored Christian Hackenberg, spotted the young player’s potential right away.

“He told Brandon at the end of his ninth-grade year that you are special and you have the ability to be one of the great ones,” Rico recalled Sullivan saying.

At that time, Smith played a flex tight end/wide receiver position. When he moved back to Louisa County for his sophomore season, he forced his way into a linebacker role. By the third game of the season, he was starting at middle linebacker, tallying 17 tackles and a pair of sacks in his debut. There was no looking back – unless it was to review game film.

Rico is a network engineer for a bank. He has a football background, too, having played at Fork Union himself. So as Brandon progressed into his high school career, Rico combined his two specialties to help his son better understand the game.

“We started a tradition that even stands until today,” Rico said. “He’s watching between five and six hours of film [on a Thursday night before a game]. Then he’s also getting tested. With me being an IT computer geek, I created a spreadsheet for all the [opponent’s] plays and I put formulas in there that will give you what they run on first down, on second down and which formation, so Brandon had the task of watching film and entering that data into the spreadsheet, and then he got quizzed.”

Because of the sacrifices he began making in eighth grade, Smith has been able to graduate early and enrolled at Penn State in January. Rico describes his son as “laid back” and “mild-mannered,” but Brandon has been driven to achieve his goals. He has also received help from a network of mentors that includes coaches, uncles and friends, and his family has a strong religious faith, which they say has helped keep him pointed in the right direction. Said Rico “The way things have worked out and how things have transpired, it’s just incredible.”