Who is the greatest athlete Attleboro area high schools have ever produced?
You could certainly make a case for Tom Nalen of Foxboro. After playing for Foxboro High School and Boston College, Nalen spent his entire 15-year career for the Denver Broncos, anchoring the offensive line for two Super Bowl championships.
Nalen was a five-time Pro Bowler and two-time first-team All-Pro, was inducted into the Broncos’ Ring of Fame in 2013 and was announced last September as a nominee for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2026.
And then there’s Jake Layman, the King Philip Regional High School basketball player who went on to play at the University of Maryland before spending six seasons in the NBA with the Portland Trail Blazers and Minnesota Timberwolves.
But their accomplishments may be topped by a kid playing right now at Bishop Feehan High School: Brody Bumila.
If you follow local sports at all, you’ve surely heard the name. Bumila averaged 42 points and 20 rebounds a game for the Shamrocks in the playoffs as they won their first boys’ basketball state championship in March.
And Bumila was outstanding not just because he’s 6-foot-9 and weighs 245 pounds. He’s good because he’s extremely athletic and fierce with a capital F. There was no defender who could stop him once he set his mind to taking a shot near the rim or grabbing a rebound.
But basketball is not even Bumila’s best sport. Since he was a kid, he loved baseball, David Ortiz and the Boston Red Sox.
That immense athletic ability is on display to an even greater degree this season as Bumila draws dozens of scouts to Feehan’s baseball games. The radar guns the scouts wield regularly record Bumila’s pitches hitting 100 mph — extremely rare for a high school player, especially one from the Northeast.
Those scouts have also seen video of his arm extension — how far from the rubber he releases the ball — reaching 7 feet, 5 inches. That’s also rare.
Bumila is committed to playing at the University of Texas, one of the biggest athletic programs in the country. But he’s also said that if he gets drafted high in July’s Major League Baseball draft, he may go pro.
Baseball America, which follows high school and college players, recently ranked him 69th among draft-eligible players. But a Boston sports columnist recently wrote that Bumila could go as high as 11th to the Washington Nationals. Even getting picked at the end of the first round would command a $3 million bonus.
Either way, he’s in for a big payday. Keep in mind that big-time college athletes can easily earn six or seven figures from NIL or name, image and likeness contracts. And he’s already got an agent.
Bumila has been working hard to become better. The Raynham resident has been a regular at RBI Baseball Academy in Foxboro.
More importantly, Bumila got stronger. He reached out to Julie Nicoletti of Kinetic Fuel, the Boston Bruins’ team nutritionist, at the start of his sophomore season when he weighed just 181 pounds. He quickly got to 211, gaining hardly any body fat.
More importantly, “He’s a good kid,” Tim Sullivan, Feehan’s president, told me.
He is co-president of the Feehan Fanatics, the student spirit group, sporting the bare-chested “F” in “FEEHAN” with five other classmates during football games. They attend every Shamrock sporting event they can, not to mention school plays and musical events.
Bumila is also a campus ministry leader who attends Catholic services on Tuesday, Friday and Sunday mornings. Raised Protestant, he had lapsed but rekindled his belief as a freshman and converted. He calls himself a “follower of Christ” first, not a baseball player first.
Come July, we’ll see how major league teams appraise him.
But I believe he may very well become the best athlete this area has ever produced.
MIKE KIRBY is the retired editor-in-chief of The Sun Chronicle. For the past two years, he has assisted the staff of the Rock Report. This opinion piece is published with permission of The Sun Chronicle.
