MALVERN, AR - Malvern hasn't seen a football player like this for a long time.
"He is going to score almost every time he touches the ball," said Wilson Intermediate School Principal Terri Bryant.
At the young age of 11-years-old, Demias Jimerson reminds a lot of people of Razorback great Madre Hill.
Update: Madre Hill was in Malvern Tuesday night to see Demias Jimerson hit the football field."If you were looking at them you would say they were very much similar," said Darryl Baker, who coached Hill and now referees Jimerson's games. "I mean they both run really fast, good kids, run with the same style."
Like Jimerson, Hill attended Wilson Intermediate School and dominated the football field so thoroughly, the league invoked what came to be known as the Madre Hill Rule. Once Hill scored three touchdowns, if his team had a 14-point lead, officials banned him from scoring any more touchdowns. Now, for the first time since, the Wilson Intermediate Football League is using the Madre Hill rule again -- to tackle Demias Jimerson.
"I got, kinda got shocked because I didn't know that was gonna happen, but it did," said Jimerson. Adding, "I'm ok with it."
Principal Bryant, the defacto commissioner of the Wilson Intermediate Football League, says the rule isn't meant to punish Jimerson. It's there to help the other fifth and sixth graders on the field develop as football players too.
"The other players on both teams, 21 are just left sort of, this is all Demias," she said. "So that's why the Madre Hill Rule has been implemented."
But the Madre Hill rule is only for fifth and sixth grades. Next year, Jimerson goes to seventh grade.
"I'm gonna run hard and bring our team to victory," said Jimerson. Then he added, "but God always comes first, before anything, and grades second."
God, grades, then touchdowns -- Madre Hill Rule or not.
Jimerson played a couple of games this season before the Wilson League invoked the Madre Hill Rule. In one of those games, he scored seven touchdowns. Jimerson's team is undefeated.
