For most of his youth, Trevin Gradney wanted to be two things – a baseball player and a Bobcat.
Growing up in Billings, he was the son of former Montana State defensive lineman Joe Gradney. But although Trevin played football, he was sure his future was on the diamond.
That is, until a conversation with former Montana State safety and Billings West assistant coach Michael Rider.
Rider first noticed Gradney’s athleticism and frame during offseason workouts at West High’s gym.
“I just remember having a conversation with him, and this is no knock on any baseball players that are listening to this,” Rider told Skyline Sports’ Colter Nuanez. “But I told him, ‘Look, you can go and have a stellar baseball career, get on a travel team and finish and go to school at Miles City Community College.’ There’s nothing wrong for those people who want to do that. But I was honest with him. I think you can really be a good football player. You’ve got long arms, you run well. You are what people look for.”
That conversation was one milestone on a journey that’s led Gradney from Billings to All-American recognition and multiple all-Big Sky honors, to the FCS national title game and to the cusp of this year’s Montana-Montana State rivalry game – but not for the ‘Cats.
As Montana’s holder of the legendary No. 37 jersey, the senior cornerback will play in his final Cat-Griz game on Saturday wearing one of the highest honors a Montana Grizzly player can achieve.
“Growing up, it was always fun to watch,” Gradney said. “I always tuned in whenever they were playing, but playing in it’s a lot more fun.”
To get to this point, Gradney has overcome numerous obstacles.
He’s gone from a JV player to a high-school star, from a partial scholarship to an All-American, from a special teamer to No. 37. Now, he’ll go into Saturday’s top-10 matchup in Bozeman as one of the most crucial players on the Grizzly defense, hoping to beat – for the third time in his career – the team he once dreamed of playing for.
Along the way, those who observed him have been singularly impressed with his work ethic, determination and attitude – qualities, they say, that have taken him to stardom as surely as the athletic gifts that Rider noticed in winter workouts.
“If somebody beat him out for a year, he wasn’t going to quit or complain,” Billings West defensive coordinator Matt Holowell said. “He was just going to work harder. He never, never complained about it, never. He just kept showing up to work.
“You could set your watch by him.”
***
What Rider saw that day has borne out truer than even the old Bobcat could imagine.
Rider, for one, thought that Gradney might go DI at Rider’s old position of safety.
Instead, Gradney’s been one of the best cover corners in the Big Sky Conference each of the last two seasons.
In man coverage, his length at 6-feet-even and speed as a former state 400-meter champion allows him to be physical with receivers at the line of scrimmage and recover quickly. In zone coverage, the ball skills that he honed playing baseball make him a prolific ballhawk.
In either coverage, he’s proven to be a dangerous target. His five interceptions last year led the conference, and he was picked first-team all-Big Sky.
Although his numbers are down – just one interception so far this season – and his tape is slightly less impressive, Gradney is still likely in line for his second-consecutive all-conference recognition at the end of the year.
“If you can find a long corner, that tightens up the throwing windows, that solves a lot of coaches’ problems,” Holowell said. “A lot of deficiencies a player might have are overcome with length. … I don’t know if he’s an absolute, like, 10.9 (second 100-meter) guy. But being long and being physical and all those attributes are nice.”
(For reference, Gradney’s PR in high school in the 100 meters was 11.23 seconds and he’s certainly faster than when he was a junior in high school. He also ran legs on state-championship sprint and mile relay teams for the Golden Bears.)
Far from a high school prodigy, Gradney in fact played sparingly at Billings West, one of the top programs in the state, early in his career.
He was on junior varsity even as a junior in 2017. Three or four games into the season, Holowell and Golden Bears head coach Rob Stanton realized that was a massive mistake.
“He played special teams for the varsity, and then he would get some time at defensive back,” Stanton said. “And then on Saturday, he would dominate the JV games. Every Sunday, when we would meet as a staff, we always talked about a lot of kids in our program, and his name kept coming up and coming up. Finally I just said, we have to play him on varsity, if he’s that good, and that’s when he started to play a lot. He took to it right away.
“We just said, we have to get this kid on the field. We screwed up. He’s got to play for us.”
Now fully focused on football, Gradney’s work ethic set him on a rocket-ship trajectory. His backpedal technique, Stanton and Holowell said, was perfect, the result of countless hours spent going through drills. He started running track in the spring, trying to get faster.
As a senior in 2018, he and close friend Jesse Owens were an unassailable cornerback tandem for Billings West. Gradney finished with nine interceptions, 24 pass breakups and four forced fumbles, and the Golden Bears won the state title.
In the spring, he was a state champion on the track in the 400 while also running legs on state-championship sprint relay and mile relay teams.
“I preach to our kids that college football coaches like track measurements,” Stanton said. “He wasn’t eye popping in the 100, but in the 400 he was breaking 50 (seconds). His four-by-four (relay) split was 48 (seconds), and that takes speed and guts. … That’s part of his character and how tough he is to be able to go through stuff like that.”
Gradney was the focus of a recruiting battle between the Griz and the ‘Cats, but instead of following in his father’s footsteps, he chose to head west over the Continental Divide to Missoula.
“I was an avid Bobcat fan, hated the Grizzlies, wanted nothing to do with them,” Gradney told Skyline Sports at the time. “I never thought I would ever consider going to Montana, but things change and here I am.
“I think I started realizing when I was up there, it was totally different than everything I thought it would be. I thought I would hate it up there, but the coaches made everything super easy, and it just seemed like a place I wanted to play and further my career.”
***
The word that jumped to his high school coaches’ minds more than any other, when asked to describe Gradney, was “coachable.”
It doesn’t take much time around him to understand what they were getting at. Gradney is unfailingly polite, always available for an interview or a quote.
On the field, that willingness to help out in any way possible made him a contributor soon relatively early at Montana.
In the fall 2021 season – two years after arriving in Missoula thanks to his redshirt and the COVID-19 pandemic – he emerged as a crucial special teams contributor for the Griz at a unique and important position.
To quote from a 2023 feature about Gradney:
Even amid the general craziness of special teams, gunners – the players who line up wide on punt coverage teams and, if they do their job right, are first downfield to make contact on the returner – are a special breed. Other names for the role, via Wikipedia: shooter, headhunter and kamikaze.
That’s the role Gradney stepped into.
“You’re trying to beat two guys in what amounts to a running street fight at a sprint,” Buffalo Bills great Steve Tasker told Esquire in 2015. “You get into an area that depends on instinct and creativity, and the whole time you have these two guys who are trying to beat you senseless.”
In 2019, ESPN’s Kevin Van Valkenburg asked Tasker and Matthew Slater – maybe the two greatest gunners of the modern era in the NFL – what the position required.
“They come up with eerily similar answers,” Van Valkenburg related. “Selflessness, toughness, fearlessness, adaptability and a willingness to be physical.”
Gradney, it turns out, was all of those things.
In that redshirt freshman season, he was named first-team all-Big Sky as a special teamer and also picked up Montana’s special teams Player of the Year award.
Speaking later, Gradney credited the tenacity that it took to cover punts with helping him become a starting Division-I cornerback later down the line.
He was a backup rotational corner and special-teams star again in 2022 before breaking into the lineup for good in 2023.
With All-American Justin Ford exhausting his eligibility, the Griz had a hole that year at cornerback across from the steady Corbin Walker.
Montana brought in multiple FBS transfers to try to replace Ford. Instead, Gradney beat them all out, becoming a rare Montana-made player to start at corner for the Griz.
In the third quarter of his first-ever start, he made an incredible one-handed interception against Butler.
The next week, he had another interception and forced a fumble by ripping the ball away from the receiver after being beaten on a deep ball against Utah Tech.
In Week 3, he took advantage of an overthrown deep ball to make a crucial interception in a close win over Ferris State, and in Week 4, he celebrated his first Big Sky Conference start with yet another pick against Northern Arizona – four interceptions in his first four games as a starting cornerback.
He had another interception in the Brawl of the Wild – the Montana State legacy kid adding to the Bobcats’ humiliation in Missoula – then had four pass breakups in Montana’s legendary run to the national title game.
He was named first-team all-Big Sky and a Walter Camp All-American.
“Gradney does a great job,” one FCS coach said before the national title game. “He’s so frickin’ long that he would reroute guys and guys would be having to get the ball out quick. He’s so long that he gets hands on guys, so he disrupts the route and then he gets his eyes on the quarterback and the ball.”
True to his nature, all of the success wasn’t enough for Gradney.
“All the hardship, the turmoil, and then finally getting to the pinnacle of last season and not finishing, I think there’s like a little bit of extra motivation there,” Gradney said during spring ball this April. “Just getting better every day, working on my craft, getting in and out of breaks better, recognizing formations better. Continue to work on footwork and getting faster, stronger, you know, the usual things.”
This year, he’s been a stalwart for a secondary that’s been through some instability with Walker gone across from him.
The Griz have rotated between Ronald Jackson Jr., true freshman Kyon Loud and a few others at the other cornerback position.
Montana is giving up slightly more passing yards – 218 per game as compared to 206 a year ago – and Gradney hasn’t been immune, giving up multiple long touchdowns against Weber State in a 55-48 loss in early October.
Since then, though, the Griz defense has turned a corner. They’ve won four out of five games since, and haven’t given up more than 20 points in any of the four wins. Montana will certainly make the FCS Playoffs for the fifth season in a row, and with a win over double-digit favorite Montana State on Saturday, it’s possible the Griz could recapture some of the late-season momentum that took them all the way to Frisco a season ago.
It remains to be seen how long this Griz season will last. What’s certain is that Gradney will be there for the whole ride, clocking in, so consistent you could set your watch by him.
“I’ll never forget first seeing him in the West High gym,” Rider said. “To see him wear the 37 jersey, that’s so cool, man. To see him have the year he did last year, an all-American season, turn around this year, wear the 37 legacy jersey, and do what he’s doing. I’m so proud of Trevin. It was a joy to coach him. It’s guys like him that make it so fun.”
