RUMFORD — Don’t let the picture fool you. Ryan Glover hates weight rooms.

“I see the weight room once a week, on Mondays, and most of the time I’m just sitting there shooting the breeze with a coach,” Glover said. “There’s something about the atmosphere of a weight room… I just don’t care for it.”

While his Mountain Valley football teammates add muscle amidst the clanking of dumbbells and the clamor of Metallica, Glover builds his considerable brute strength the old fashioned way, amidst the braying of horses and buzzing of chainsaws while working on the family farm in Milton or logging the woods around the River Valley.

“That keeps me in shape during the off-season,” he said.

“He’s a farm boy,” Mountain Valley coach Jim Aylward said. “He’s a kid that works more outside of football than he does in football. He’s expected to put in an honest day’s work after school and football. He’s just a tough, tough kid.”

A two-way force for Mountain Valley, Glover regularly clear-cut a defense as a right guard in front of the Falcons’ running backs. As a devastating middle linebacker, he would jackstraw blockers and fell opposing ball-carriers like dead birch.

Glover, a junior, was the most dominant player on the most dominant team in the tri-county area, and is the Sun Journal’s 2010 all-region football player of the year.

Ask opponents why the Falcons’ defense was able to constrict every possible artery of their offense until it suffocated, and they will tell you Mountain Valley won so many of the one-on-one battles that take place on every play.

But they weren’t satisfied once they won their battle.They wanted to punish the next guy. If the next guy had the ball, all the better. Then they wanted to score. The defense wanted to score. It wanted to outscore the other team’s offense, and it often did in a season where it posted eight shutouts and surrendered just 30 points. That’s how they pounded opponents into submission, often before the first half horn sounded.

While all of the Falcons did their fair share of the pounding, the 5-foot-9, 190-pound Glover was often the one to lay the first lick, the hit that let the opposition know the crushing defense they had already heard about had arrived at their doorstep.

“Coming up all the years I’ve been playing, up through AYF, middle school and high school, before we’d go on the field the coaches would always say, ‘Who’s going to get the first hit,'” Glover said. “I always love to have that first hit.”

Glover set the tone all season, including early on in the Falcons’ 20-0 blanking of defending Class B champion Leavitt in the state title game..

“Leavitt had given a ball to someone on the ‘give’ (play), and it looked like they had opened a hole behind their guard,” Aylward recalled. “Ryan read his guard and filled it, so when the kid planted his foot to cut to the hole, Ryan had just about decapitated him. I thought that was really a big part of the game.”

“If you set that guy down across from you right away, they’re going to avoid contact with you any time they can,” Glover said. “It’s like softening up a plum.”

Glover didn’t just soften up the plums in games. In practice the week of the state game, Aylward had to call a halt to the contact after Glover laid a similar hit on one of his teammates on the scout team.

“He pretty much brought practice to a halt,” Aylward said.

“When you have kids like that who are practicing like that, it’s contagious,” Aylward said. “He not only never took a play off in a game, he never takes a play off in practice.”

But Glover didn’t just use his brawn to lead the Falcons in tackles with 106, and collect 3 1/2 sacks. An honor student at Mountain Valley, Glover used his brains and his ears to become a prolific tackler.

“He had some really tough kids around him, but he became such a technically sound linebacker,” Aylward said. “He’s a tough nut, but throw on top of that that he’s extremely coachable. When we’d go into a week and start breaking down our opponents, Ryan just got it. He really understands how to play linebacker.”

Glover began the season as the Falcon with the greatest understanding of how to play offensive line, too.

He was the only returning starter on the line, and Aylward moved him from center to guard, although there was some thought of playing him at fullback, which he had played earlier in his career.

“We leaned on him a lot,” Aylward said. “When we really were in a pinch, he was the guy we went behind. He and (tackle) Tyler Morton were our bread and butter, and really, it was Ryan that carried us at times in the line this year.”

“We had some tough kids up front,” Glover said. “I had big Tyler Morton next to me and he helped me a lot.”

“We all just keep working together, all 11 guys,” he said. “You’ve got 11 guys on the field and it takes 11 guys to play the game. One person doesn’t win a game.”

Indeed, it took more than 11 Falcons to put together a perfect season and win fourth state title in the last seven years, an accomplishment that Glover, normally as articulate an athlete as you can meet, still has trouble putting into words.

“I can’t even explain how awesome it was to get that,” Glover said. “When we got the gold ball my freshman year (in 2008), I was standing on the sidelines most of the time so I wasn’t as excited as a I was this year. I started tearing up this year when we got it.”

Glover’s relentlessness on both sides of the ball was a major factor in getting it.

“The kid just plays so hard,” Aylward said. “He’s not the biggest kid on the field, but boy oh boy, when we watch him on game film, he just never takes a play off. He just goes 100 miles an hour.”

QB Cam Kaubris, Sr., Mountain Valley

QB Jordan Hersom, Jr., Leavitt

RB Teven Colon, Sr., Edward Little

RB Josh Allen, Sr., Oak Hill

RB Taylor Bradley, Sr., Mountain Valley

WR Cody Dussault, Sr., Lewiston

WR Joey Brennan, Sr., Winthrop

WR Christian Durland, Sr., Mountain Valley

OL Cody Meserve, Sr., Edward Little

OL Ben Wigant, Sr., Lewiston

OL Max Cloutier, Sr., Leavitt

OL Ryan Glover, Jr., Mountain Valley

OL Matt Archer, Sr., Mt. Blue

UT Spencer Ross, Sr., Dirigo

K Max Cloutier, Sr., Leavitt

First team defense

DL Cory Spruill, Sr., Edward Little

DL Jesse Pelletier, Sr., Leavitt

DL Christian Durland, Sr., Mountain Valley

DL Zach Frost, Sr., Leavitt

LB Ryan Glover, Jr., Mountain Valley

LB Ben Wigant, Sr., Lewiston

LB Colten Miranda, Sr., Mt., Blue

LB Jordan Croteau, Soph., Oxford Hills

DB Cam Kaubris, Sr., Mountain Valley

DB Jordan Hersom, Jr., Leavitt

DB Jeff Keene, Sr., Lewiston

DB Tobey Harrington, Sr., Lisbon

P Josh Allen, Sr., Oak Hill

Second team offense

QB Jordan Whitney, Soph., Mt. Blue

QB Travis Luce, Sr., Winthrop

RB Joe McKinnon, Jr., Lewiston

RB Jake Ouellette, Sr., Leavitt

RB Ryan Conant, Sr., Winthrop

WR Lucas Witham, Sr., Leavitt

WR A.J. Larrabee, Sr., Mt. Blue

WR Kyle Storer, Sr., Jay

OL Elliot Chicoine, Sr., Lewiston

OL James Morin, Sr., Leavitt

OL John Crafts, Sr., Lisbon

OL Matt Nicholson, Sr., Lisbon

OL Arik Fenstermacher, Sr., Dirigo

UT Cam Sennick, Jr., Mt. Blue

K Shawn Keach, Jr., Mt. Blue

Second team defense

DL Ryan Dubois, Sr., Lewiston

DL Jake Richards, Jr., Livermore Falls

DL Nick Cody, Sr., Oak Hill

DL Zack Barter, Sr., Winthrop

LB Mike McNamara, Sr., Lisbon

LB Conrad Labbe, Sr., Poland

LB Izaak Mills, Jr., Mountain Valley

LB Jake Dowland, Jr., Dirigo

DB Jordan D. Couture, Sr., Jay

DB Craig Morrill, Sr., Oak Hill

DB Taylor Bradley, Sr., Mountain Valley

DB Eric Berry, Jr., Mt. Blue

P Rashaud Lavoie, Sr., Mountain Valley