Floyd's Ja'Quan Thomas wins Newsday's Hansen Award

Senior Ja’Quan Thomas is one of the greats in Floyd football history.
   He destroyed the competition as a junior in 2024 with 2,594 yards rushing and 37 touchdowns as the Colonials won the Suffolk Division I crown. The Jets named Thomas the Tri-State Player of the Year in 2024 when he had all five touchdowns in a 34-6 win over Ward Melville in the Suffolk final.
  The encore to his first full season was even better when one considers that every defensive coordinator schemed to stop Thomas and the Floyd running attack.
  With no threat of a potent passing game, Thomas still managed to romp for 2,079 yards rushing and 31 touchdowns, leading the Colonials back to the Division I championship game.
  The fitting conclusion to an incredible career came in this year’s title game against Ward Melville. Thomas stepped in at quarterback — having never played the position before — and the offense didn’t miss a beat. He performed out of the shotgun formation as if he’d played the position his entire life.
  Thomas was just a special kind of athlete. He was pure talent.
  How about this little-known tidbit? He scored in every varsity game he played for Floyd — all 27 of them.
  So it was no surprise that Thomas was voted the 66th recipient of Newsday’s Carl A. Hansen Award as Suffolk’s most outstanding player at the Suffolk County Football Coaches Association dinner on Monday night at the Hyatt Regency in Hauppauge. He’s also a two-time winner of the Joe Cipp Award, presented to Suffolk’s most outstanding running back.
  The 6-1, 225-pound Thomas became the third player in Floyd’s history to garner the prestigious Hansen Award, following Brock Jackolski (2007) and Stacey Bedell (2011).

 “The big guy can knock you down and run you over,” Floyd coach Paul Longo said. “He has great vision and tremendous balance. He can run away from people but likes to go through them. He would be gang-tackled and pop out of a pile and run for a long TD. We’d be amazed: ‘How did he do that?’ ”
  Longo said Thomas was different from Floyd’s other great runners.   “Stacey Bedell and Brock Jackolski were pure burners,” he said. “They would outrun everyone. They were phenomenal runners and impossible to tackle in the open field.”
  Thomas gave the Floyd faithful a sign of things to come when he averaged more than 10 yards per carry in a four-game span in his sophomore season.
  In his junior and senior years, Thomas never rushed for fewer than 122 yards in a game. He set the school record for career points with 438, surpassing Bedell’s 436. He tied the school record of 72 total touchdowns set by Bedell from 2009-11. The difference: Bedell achieved it in 36 games and Thomas needed only 27.
  “He was like an escape artist,” Longwood coach Sean Kluber said. “We had stopped him on a few plays, and he would keep his legs moving and come out of the pack. He was relentless.”
  When Thomas was in middle school, opposing coaches complained that he should be moved to the junior varsity level.
  Thomas was dominating as a seventh- grader on the JV 9 team but moved back to the middle school team in eighth grade to play with his friends.
  “Varsity coaches asked me why we had Derrick Henry playing on the eighth-grade team in reference to a then-13-year-old phenom named Ja’Quan Thomas,” Longo said, laughing at the comparison of a young kid to the Baltimore Ravens’ star halfback. “No one could tackle him at that level.”
  Longo laughed again.

 “Geez, they could hardly tackle him at the varsity level,” he said. “I knew he was special when he scored against Sachem North in the Suffolk championship game as a sophomore.”
  Thomas was so athletic that the coaching staff held back some of the things he could do, such as throw a football.
  They never allowed him to throw an option pass, keeping that top secret until the Suffolk title game. In a brilliant coaching decision, Longo, the winningest public schools coach in Suffolk history, moved Thomas to quarterback in the Wildcat formation.
  Longo, who has led Floyd to 21 Suffolk championship games and a Suffolk-record 15 titles in his 31 years, knew the offensive wrinkle would fluster the Ward Melville defense.
  “Ja’Quan was amazing,” Longo said. “We were one play away from another title.”
  Thomas completed six of seven passes for 143 yards and a touchdown. He also ran for 184 yards and three touchdowns while trying to lift the Colonials to another title. They came up short in a 31-28 loss to Ward Melville.
  “I’d trade every yard for a championship,” he said afterward. “But I’m proud of my team. We battled every play.”
 Thomas finished with 4,986 yards rushing.
  Quite the career.
Newsday’s Andy Slawson

contributed to this story.

By Gregg Sarra

gregg.sarra@newsday.com@Gregg_Sarra

Gregg Sarra is Newsday's high school sports editor and has been on the beat since the mid-1980s.