Meet Providence DL Cory Cunningham, new to football, already a national 2028 star
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Cory Cunningham has 21 college offers and is ranked No. 15 among 2028 DL prospects.
- In his sophomore season, the 17-year-old recorded 15 sacks and 28 tackles for loss.
- Providence went 8-4, won a conference championship and Cunningham had 60 tackles.
Providence High defensive lineman Cory Cunningham has 21 college football offers and is ranked No. 15 among all defensive linemen in America in the class of 2028.
Not bad for a 17-year-old who has only been playing football for less than two years.
“I should’ve started earlier,” said Cunningham, a 6-foot-4, 275-pound sophomore. “I feel like I could’ve been better my freshman year for sure.”
Cunningham, doing spring practice drills with his teammates this month, didn’t play pee wee ball, and his middle school didn’t have a team. But he was becoming so big and so long that his father basically set him up with a personal trainer and then dropped him off at Providence High’s summer workouts in 2024, a few months before his freshman year began.
“It was hard trying to adapt to how everyone moved,” Cunningham said. “You see all the older guys just flowing through the drills. It’s just like, ‘Dang, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ So asking for help was a good thing. It felt good to have leaders on your team who can guide you through it.”
Cunningham may not have had much history with football drills, but he had natural ability few teenagers his age possess, plus that big body and an 80-inch wingspan. South Carolina coaches offered the raw rising freshman a few weeks before he started high school.
“It’s his athletic ability, his God-given build,” Providence coach Wes Ward said. “But he didn’t know what he was doing when he stepped out there as a youngster, but he had this ability to be coached and be humble and listen. That’s what kind of developed him from what he looked like his freshman year into his sophomore year.”
Ward said Cunningham looked a bit lost as a freshman, but he kept working in the Providence weight room and kept working with that personal trainer.
By the time his second season rolled around, Cunningham looked — and played — like “a totally different kid,” Ward said.
Cunningham helped lead the Panthers to a conference championship last fall, an 8-4 record and a second-round playoff berth. He finished the season with 60 tackles, 34 of which were solo tackles. And Cunningham had 28 tackles for a loss and 15 sacks. His sacks ranked eighth among sophomores nationally.
Cunningham said he was shocked by how quickly everything came together.
“I was very surprised because of how my freshman year went,” he said. “It was rocky coming into my sophomore year. But then it just was just fluent. I just knew what I was doing, and I knew the plays and I studied the playbook. So that’s when everything became so smooth.”
Ward is still amazed that Cunningham has come so far so fast.
“He’s got great genetics,” Ward said, “but being in our weight room, being in our strength program, that’s really, really supercharged him to be able to play at a certain level.
“And on top of that, you put in his ability to take in what he needs to do, to be coached, as well as being a fundamentally sound player, and that’s kind of what’s setting him apart.”
Cunningham has offers from schools such as Auburn, Georgia, Michigan and Texas as well as from in-state programs Duke and N.C. State. He tells a story of taking an unofficial visit to Oregon recently and looking up at the jumbotron in amazement and later sitting in the office of Ducks’ coach Dan Lanning.
Cunningham said Lanning pulled up his high school highlights and the Oregon coach told the Providence star that he had been studying his game.
“That was pretty special,” Cunningham said. “I just felt like I was loved, and I saw how everything flowed. I just think that was just a perfect moment.”
Ward thinks that moments like those on the recruiting trail are really just getting started for a player who has two full seasons left — and a whole lot of potential to try to reach.
“It’s scary,” Ward said. “The big thing is for him to just keep working, to be a good teammate, to start to develop that leadership part of it because you’re no longer the baby on the team. Like, you’re the guy, you’re older now. Start developing that part of your game: being the first one up to practice, being the guy who’s leading people, instead of just saying, ‘I’m going to do my job.’
“That’s the next part of his development, and you know, that’s only going to make him better and to get him more ready for the next level.”
