When he was 4 years old, Giovanni Reviere really didn’t want to play football.
So during his first practice in the River City Football League, Reviere said he had to go to the bathroom but sprinted underneath the bleachers at Dalewood Middle School, attempting to hide before a coach found him and told the young player “we’re going to get you tough today.”
“I was a little scared of contact at first,” Reviere said. “But once I got hit a few times, I got back up and realized I can take hits or I can deliver them, either way.”
He has done a lot more in the way of delivering them.
His path took him to McCallie, where he was a Mr. Football semifinalist in TSSAA Division II-AA as a senior. That led to an opportunity to play at Purdue, where he started all 13 games as a redshirt freshman defensive lineman in 2018 for the Boilermakers. But two years later, he transferred to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he’s now in a rotating group of players on the defensive line.