USC TE Lake McRee shows he's hard to keep down – Orange County Register

COLLEGE PARK – Flag football was never quite the game Lake McRee was intended for, and yet a flag football game is still one of Clint McRee's fondest memories of his son's childhood.

In one game, Lake McRee's quarterback threw a pick, as Clint McRee tells it, so obvious that most kids would have relented and made no attempt to chase it down. But as the field turned, a young McRee sprinted toward the defender, lunged, and ripped the flag away from him a yard from the cross into the end zone.

After the game, the opposing coach turned to Clint McRee.

“We’ll probably read about Lake one day,” McRee’s father recalled, “in the newspaper sometime.”

He was a long-time prospect, a former high school standout at Texas and junior tight end at USC who had led the Trojans in receiving yards in the first two games of 2024. He was also in the papers. However, he was very unlucky as injuries have slowed his momentum at every turn since his time at Lake Travis. First, he suffered a torn ACL in his freshman year of high school. Then another rift occurred in a practice before the Holiday Bowl in December. And after a remarkably quick recovery, Lake McRee collapsed to the ground in Week 3 after a low blow from a Michigan defender, who burst into tears on the sideline bench after limping away.

Within four games and after what initially looked like another season-ending injury, Lake McRee started again at tight end for USC on Saturday against Maryland.

“He just keeps bouncing back,” Trojans head coach Lincoln Riley said in September, before his latest surge. “He’s incredibly tough, resilient, a smart player.”

In short, the ACL tear before the Holiday Bowl was devastating, as Clint McRee put it. His son was motivated to get a glimpse of the future by catching balls from backup and starter Miller Moss. The two became closer after coming to USC in the same 2021 class. Instead, he collapsed in a bowl practice that Riley called a “punch in the gut” before the Holiday Bowl, and a long road awaited him before he could return – at all – after his second cruciate ligament operation.

But that first tear, his first year of high school, was, in a way, a blessing. Lake McRee had been through it physically and mentally. He knew exactly what his rehab would entail. And he never let himself go anywhere in spirit, his father said, because he thought he wouldn't come back.

“I always tried to tell myself that I would be back – not even for the first game, so I wanted to be back for fall camp,” Lake McRee said at the start of the fall. “If I scored my goal for that, I would definitely be back in the first game. So that was kind of my plan.”

For soccer players, cruciate ligament tears can take about a year to fully recover. Lake McRee was back in about seven months and suited up for the start of USC fall camp. Clint McRee said he had one direct goal in rehab, namely to minimize muscle atrophy; He did physical therapy three times a day, six times a week.

“I would venture to say that from a football standpoint, Lake actually started this season stronger and bigger than last year,” Clint McRee said.