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Her son agreed.
"So I take him and show up. I said: 'He's 10 years old. I think he can throw a football but I don't know for sure. Can he stay?' "
Levasseur grabbed a regulation-size Canadian Football League ball, backed up 10 yards, and threw it into a receiver's chest.
McManus, who played 17 years in the CFL and now works as a coaching consultant for the CFL's Hamilton Tiger-Cats, took note. "I didn't want older kids throwing to younger kids and having one take one in the face," he said. "But the first time seeing Matt throw the ball, I had no worries. The biggest was he was way advanced in his throwing motions and techniques [compared] with kids probably four or five years older than him."
Shortly thereafter, Trisha asked McManus what he thought of sending her son to school in the United States, thinking the sooner Matt made the move, the better off he might be. McManus liked the idea.
"In Canada, hockey is the number one sport, but in the States football is pretty dominant in most schools and he probably would get a coach who works with quarterbacks and get one-on-one training," McManus said. "If he wanted to be a hockey player, I would tell him to stay in Canada.
"You can never predict how successful anyone is going to be," McManus added. "Opportunities will come and go. It depends what Matt does with those opportunities. All Matt has done is put himself in position to get those opportunities."
Because Levasseur is Canadian, he needed to find an American school that could accept foreign students. Trisha, who owns a Web site directory company, and her husband, Patrick Keith, who is an investment adviser and day trader, wanted to place Matt in a military school, because they believed a structured boarding school regimen was important. They enrolled him in seventh grade at Valley Forge Military Academy outside Philadelphia for the 2006-07 school year, though dropping off their son so far from home didn't come without hesitation.
"I felt like the worst mom in the whole wide world," Trisha said. "He's crying. He's this short [5 feet 1]. And he's got his head shaved. And I'm thinking, what did I do?"
Levasseur was too young to play football for Valley Forge's teams, but a staff member, Earl Irvine, enrolled him in a local youth league. After one year at Valley Forge, Levasseur returned to Ontario for the 2007-08 school year, repeating the seventh grade at a local private school -- following a common practice of prep athletes being held back so that they can mature physically and perhaps be better prepared to earn a college scholarship.
"He will be 18 going into his senior year, the same age as Jimmy Clausen [when he was a high school senior], the same age as most quarterbacks in California," Trisha said, referencing the Notre Dame quarterback who, like her son, has worked with noted Southern California quarterback trainer Steve Clarkson. "That's who he's competing against."
Trisha first took an interest in Clarkson after reading a story online about another middle schooler who made a cross-country trip to work with Clarkson. Levasseur made three trips this past year, she said, with the initial two-day, 15-hour assessment meeting with Clarkson costing $1,200.
