Thomas Heiberger was six games into his junior season last October before he earned his first football scholarship offer. Heiberger, a native of Sioux Falls, S.D., felt ecstatic about the interest from South Dakota State, a program on its way to winning an FCS national championship.
Heiberger’s high school coach, Vince Benedetto, was a former South Dakota State player with good relationships in the program. So when he began having conversations with Jackrabbits coaches, they were willing to offer an honest assessment about how they thought the recruiting process would play out.
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The verdict? South Dakota State, for all its prowess, would not stand a chance. Heiberger was simply too good of an outside linebacker.
“When they offered, they just said, ‘We’re not going to touch him because there’s not a lot of 6-foot-4 kids that move and bend the way that Thomas does,’” Benedetto recalled.
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That evaluation proved to be prescient. In late November, Heiberger was invited to and attended game day visits at Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. By January, he exploded onto the recruiting scene, earning scholarship offers from 13 FBS schools, including 12 Power 5 programs.
No school pushed as hard as Wisconsin, which quickly made inroads with a new coaching staff. The Badgers brought Heiberger on campus for a junior day visit in January, and outside linebackers coach Matt Mitchell offered him a scholarship. He returned for a follow-up trip two Saturdays ago so he could watch spring practice under Luke Fickell.
Heiberger, whose only other school visit this year was to Nebraska for its junior day in March, didn’t need to see anything else. He cancelled planned visits for later this month to Illinois, Notre Dame and Washington and committed to Wisconsin during a Thursday phone call to Mitchell. Heiberger publicly announced his decision Sunday afternoon. He becomes Wisconsin’s fifth known commitment in the 2024 recruiting class and the first on the defensive side of the ball.
“I felt the question pop up in my head: Why not Wisconsin?” Heiberger said. “I couldn’t think of anything. Nothing came to mind. I wanted to play Big Ten football. I want to compete for Big Ten championships and I believe that Wisconsin is going to be doing that here. I had been there three times, two with the new staff, and the relationships that I’d built with the staff and even some of the players, I didn’t think I was going to get anywhere else.”
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Heiberger, who is listed at 6-4 and 210 pounds, possesses the kind of measurables that make major college programs salivate. He has a 39-inch vertical leap, can broad jump 10 feet, 7 inches and runs a 4.6-second 40-yard dash. This spring, he decided to participate in track and field for the first time. His two events could not be more disparate: shot put and the 100-meter dash.
During Heiberger’s second career meet on Friday, he ran a personal best 11.23 seconds in the 100 to finish in fifth place out of 36 participants in the event. On Saturday morning, Benedetto said Heiberger was back in the gym for football workouts and squatted 450 pounds.
“He’s pretty incredible,” Benedetto said.
Some may wonder how in the world an athlete like that didn’t see his recruitment pick up sooner. Heiberger’s mom, Megan Ver Steeg, said a large part of it had to do with the fact that Heiberger played quarterback until his sophomore season. That year, a new high school opened in Sioux Falls and because of the way the district lines were drawn, Heiberger transferred from Roosevelt High to Jefferson High. Benedetto, his new coach, immediately moved him to outside linebacker, where Heiberger’s raw talent developed over time.
The only football camp Heiberger attended was at South Dakota State last summer, so he remained under the radar. He also came from a baseball family — his dad, Jake, played at South Dakota State — and thought that sport would be his path to college.
But then Heiberger blossomed last season on the football field. He finished with 44 tackles, 10 tackles for loss and six sacks while helping lead Jefferson to a 12-0 record and a state championship. Benedetto, who ran a 3-3 stack defense, used Heiberger as a strongside linebacker and lined him up at defensive end to rush the passer in third-down situations. Heiberger also showed the versatility to occasionally play safety in certain spots.
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“He’s one of the most coachable kids that I’ve ever been around,” Benedetto said. “I coach the quarterbacks. He’ll come down with us every once in a while because if we ever had an injury, he would’ve been the next guy in. You tell Tommy one thing once, and he’s going to do it. I think when he gets into a program like Wisconsin, that’s a developmental program, they want guys there for four and five years. I think he’s going to flourish and get a lot better.”
Heiberger’s world changed in January after staffers from Texas Tech expressed interest but wanted him to verify some of his measurables such as wingspan and height. Heiberger had a few friends film him and sent the video on to Texas Tech. On Jan. 20, he earned his first FBS offer from the Red Raiders. Wisconsin offered two days later during his junior day visit. Then came offers from Western Michigan, Nebraska, Washington, Vanderbilt, Oklahoma, and Kansas in a five-day span. Kansas State, Illinois, Stanford, Purdue and Utah followed in February.
“It’s just been crazy,” Heiberger said. “I’m so grateful for every opportunity.”
Heiberger’s junior day visit to Wisconsin served as a major turning point in his recruitment. He watched film with Mitchell, who explained how Wisconsin coaches saw him fitting into the defensive scheme. Heiberger said Wisconsin’s coaching staff told him he could eventually fill the role currently occupied by Darryl Peterson, playing off the ball and roaming the field in a variety of ways. Wisconsin liked Heiberger’s ability to rush the passer and set the edge and his athleticism to cover in the pass game.
“One of the things I noticed right away is how excited everyone was, how intense they were,” said Jake, who joined his son on the junior day trip. “That’s something that I left Wisconsin really impressed with — like these guys are fired up. They’re fired up not only for the football but then they’re fired up around these recruits. They’re excited bringing these kids in. Even I left feeling excited. I left Madison feeling like, ‘Wow, this is going to be hard to beat for these other schools.’”
It was. And now, Heiberger — after a meteoric recruiting rise — is ready to embrace Wisconsin’s outside linebacker tradition and build on it with a new coaching staff.
“The outside linebackers in the past, Wisconsin breeds them,” Heiberger said. “They’ve put great Wisconsin linebackers into the NFL. They develop guys just as good as anybody. I know they have a new staff, but they’re planning on keeping that outside linebacker unique to Wisconsin. That’s a position where they see me as being versatile. That’s what I want to do.”
(Photo courtesy of Clocy Photography)
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