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Looking to give back
Hubbard grad Matt Jones returns to supportive hometown
By Brian Dzenis
YOUNGSTOWN
On paper, Matt Jones looks like a one-year rental for Youngstown State’s football team.
The redshirt-senior center from Hubbard will join the Penguins this fall after spending the previous four years at West Virginia.
Look a little deeper and you can see him planting down roots. He bought a house in Hubbard. He married high school sweetheart, Alexis Tribby. They obtained a dog together. He’s studying to become a special education teacher.
He still keeps in touch with Mary Mathews-Bebich or “Mrs. B,” his former teacher in middle school and high school that is now the director of special services for the Hubbard School District. This community is important to him because it helped him fight his biggest battle off the field.
Jones lives with learning disabilities. He has issues with reading, writing and phonetics. For example, he can answer any question orally, but if he was asked to read and respond to a question in writing, it could be an arduous task and the final result may not have the same clarity or detail as student without a disability.
Jones was a special education student at Hubbard. At West Virginia, he received accommodations to allow him to complete his degree.
“I never though I would be where I’m at today, but Mrs. B helped me out. Alexis helped me out.
“My Dad always told me that I could get a college degree for free through football,” Jones said. “I’d tell any athlete that is in special ed or has a disability to just keep working. Keep pushing. Don’t let people tell you you can’t do something because you’ve got a learning disability.”
YOUNG MATT
Dave Jones never doubted his son was going to be an elite talent on the football field.
He was big enough to hold his own against 11- and 12-year-olds at age 10 even though he needed to lose 40 pounds to meet the weight limits to play. Even with the dieting, he eventually became too big to play youth football.
“At 11 years old, he wasn’t able to play. He was too heavy,” Dave said. “He was too young to play with [seventh- and eighth-graders].”
Most of Dave’s concerns with Matt were in the classroom. Matt’s kindergarten teacher noticed Matt was struggling and had him tested and the teacher correctly guessed that Matt needed to be in special education classes.
“I was hoping he would graduate high school,” Dave said. “When they told me he couldn’t read or that he couldn’t understand ABC — I was wondering if he could get out of school.”
Mathews-Bebech entered Matt’s life when he was in seventh grade. A resignation within the district allowed her to keep working with Matt in high school. She started out as an intervention specialist, someone who could work alongside a general education teacher of any subject while they conducted class.
She was his full-time English teacher in middle school because that was the subject he struggled with the most.
In high school, she went to classes alongside Jones and other special education students.
Afterwards, she could provide additional tutoring or services, like helping to write an essay to get into college or take a standardized test.
“Matt has so much to offer. He always got the big picture but couldn’t put the pieces together on his own, but we can talk through it and it’s like ‘look what I did,’” Mathews-Bebech said. “We had to make him the master of his own universe.
“Not that he was one to depend on other people, but I worried about people trying to exploit him or get him to always do things the easy way — he didn’t need someone to do things for him.
“He had to do things for himself.”
For Jones, where Mathews-Bebich excelled came in making him comfortable enough to accept help and to understand he wasn’t alone.
“I wasn’t a special case. There were a lot of guys who have what I have. No hears about it. No one talks about it,” Jones said. “[At Hubbard] some of the special ed classes were large. It was big thing for Mrs. B. She didn’t make you feel like an outcast. You were doing all the things other kids were doing.”
GETTING TO COLLEGE
Neither Jones nor his father had much concern about his disability being an obstacle as far as recruitment went as every school interested in Jones had programs for students with learning disabilities.
His disability also doesn’t affect his ability to play football as reading playbooks and defenses as a center is visual and not an issue.
He committed to the Mountaineers well before the Penguins made their pitch about two weeks before National Signing Day. He didn’t second-guess his college decision, but Penguins head coach Bo Pelini left him with a parting thought.
“I always wanted to play [in a Power Five conference]. There was a part of me that felt I would be comfortable playing at YSU,” Jones said. “When Coach Pelini came to offer, it was like his first week on the job he told [former teammates L.J. Scott, Tyler Taafe and I] that if we need to come home, YSU is here.
“That always stuck in the back of my head.”
Jones started every game in his final two seasons at West Virginia. He considers his debut against then-No. 21 Virginia Tech in 2017 and beating then-No. 15 Texas on the road, 42-41, with a two-point conversion in the fourth quarter as his proudest moments.
All the while, he lived a mostly anonymous existence in Morgantown.
“People stared at him, but no one would come up and talk to him,” Tribby said. “He gets recognized more [in Youngstown].”
Jones got what he needed from West Virginia: his undergraduate degree in criminology and experience playing in the Big 12, but it was time to come home.
COMING HOME
When Jones announced on Jan. 11 that he was entering the transfer portal, he and Tribby got a barrage of phone calls from coaches.
“We’d be in a movie theater and he’d get one or two phone calls from this coach or that coach,” Tribby said. “When he announced he was going to leave, it was non-stop.”
At least 20 schools inquired about Jones. Coaches received his number via the transfer portal — an online database where athletes can sign up to be contacted by other schools to transfer.
Penn State, Louisville and North Carolina were among the schools chasing Jones and tried to leverage the fact they had some of Jones’ former coaches from West Virginia on staff. YSU still won out.
“They have what I want to study for my masters,” Jones said. “[Special ed] is what I want to do as a career after football.”
For Jones, the Mahoning Valley has everything he needs: a place to play football, a place to live and the support system that helped make him the athlete he is.
“Hubbard means a lot. Not just for me, but for Alexis, too,” Jones said. “It’s nice to be home.”