Will Levis is a numbers guy. In the classroom, math is his subject. The most difficult courses on his schedule for his senior year at Xavier High School in Middletown, Conn., were AP calculus and AP statistics. He passed both easily, grading out high enough to bypass the final exams and get a head start on his college career at Penn State. He’s thinking about majoring in finance, but he was undecided when he enrolled earlier this month.

Numbers, after all, are what helped him secure a scholarship in the first place. As Levis recalled, “My process started kind of late.”

Awarded three stars by Rivals.com and rated the 30th-best quarterback in the Class of 2018, Levis didn’t start collecting offers until this time last summer. His junior season film was good – he threw for nearly 2,000 yards, 19 touchdowns and only five interceptions – but colleges wanted to see more. Spots were beginning to fill up at colleges across the country, so Levis hit the road, choosing destinations that might have an available scholarship for him. He camped at Florida State, Iowa, North Carolina, Syracuse and Connecticut and earned offers at each stop. His final workout came at Penn State, and Levis slung the football all over Holuba Hall.

By the time he left that weekend, he was a Nittany Lion, and what helped him most were the numbers he put up in testing. Specifically, it was his 4.69-second run in the 40-yard dash that assured head coach James Franklin that he had found his next QB recruit, someone with the mental makeup, throwing ability and the athleticism to take off and run once in a while.

Hoping to build the prospect’s speed a little more, Franklin encouraged Levis to go out for track this spring before heading off to college.

“He wants to see me in those 4.5 numbers, which is definitely obtainable for me,” Levis said. “That’s why I did track. Coach Franklin was always telling me that his main focus for me this off-season is just to try to get [faster].”

Whatever it takes to improve his numbers, Levis said he is going to do it. And he is already making progress. Every time he ran the 100-meter dash in a meet, he lowered his mark. His finale was his personal best, as he finished in 11.28 seconds. At the time, he weighed more than 225 pounds and stood 6-foot-3.

Levis also uses numbers to his advantage when he’s on the football field – and not just for measuring. His quick count comes in handy when he’s looking over defenses before the snap, identifying their strength, calculating angles and discovering the correct combination to crack the puzzle in front of him.

“How the pieces of math fit together, there’s always a set solution,” Levis said. “There’s always a set solution to a defense. There is the free-ball aspect where you can go out there and do different things, but there are always plays and combinations that fit against different defenses, like there are always equations and [formulas] that fit with certain problems.”

Reading defenses is considered to be one of Levis’s strengths, and that’s a skill that can’t be quantified using a set criteria. It’s more intangible than that, and something Levis is continually trying to hone.

“As a quarterback, it’s one of the things you have to improve upon year to year,” he said. “Just maturing and getting more starts under your belt is the best way to do that. I got to the point where I got a lot better at that my senior year, recognizing coverages, choosing plays and selecting routes that would be open against certain coverages. But it gets a lot more complicated with the next level at college.”

Thanks to those good grades he got in math class and his other courses, Levis has been able to get a jump on his college career by enrolling more than a month earlier than many of his soon-to-be classmates. His school didn’t allow him to graduate in December, but because Levis was exempt from all but two of his finals he was able to wrap up his high school career and enroll at Penn State in time for the first six-week summer session, which started May 14.

“Quick turnaround, but I’m ready for it and I want to get there early,” he said. “Especially as a quarterback, because I couldn’t early enroll, just to get the playbook down better and get a good handle on things and then serve as a leader when the rest of the [incoming freshmen] come in June.”