Jalen Nailor<\/a> earned from his first Pop Warner football coach in Palmdale, California. It was Nailor’s first week ever playing tackle football, with the team lined up to do conditioning sprints at the end of practice. As Nailor tells the story, he was “beating everybody by a pretty good margin.”<\/p>\n“He came up to me and said, ‘I’m just going to start calling you Speedy,'” Nailor recalled, “and that was that.”<\/p>\n
The nickname carried over to Las Vegas. He moved to Southern Nevada as a teen to play at national powerhouse Bishop Gorman High School. It was there Nailor won multiple state championships in football and track and field, and was ranked the No. 1 wide receiver prospect in the state of Nevada by 247Sports and Rivals.com. He totaled 108 receptions for 1,995 and 28 touchdown grabs with the Gaels.<\/p>\n
“He was one of the fastest guys out there at all times,” said Brent Browner, head coach at Bishop Gorman. Browner was the team’s defensive backs coach when Nailor was there, as the receiver also played cornerback.<\/p>\n
“He was a ballhawk, everything you want as a receiver,” Browner added. “He wasn’t just fast, he was explosive, crisp route running, could get in and out of his breaks and he was a tough player. I don’t think he ever missed a game. Quiet guy but really competitive. He’s not going to whoop and holler, but he’s going to make it happen.”<\/p>\n
After four seasons with the Minnesota Vikings, the team that drafted him with a sixth-round pick in 2022, the receiver returns to the city where he put his name on the map.<\/p>\n
“Knowing that I was going to be coming back here, it was so fun to me to be able to come back to my roots,” Nailor said. “And I still have those connections with Gorman, you know I’ve got plenty connections all around the city. So, just to have that behind me, it’s just going to motivate me more to show my talents.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nobody is given a nickname like “Speedy” by accident. It’s a moniker Jalen Nailor earned from his first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822790,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2065],"tags":[103558,7,268,269,3973,1744,393,2455,2454,5411,6,525],"class_list":{"0":"post-822789","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-las-vegas-raiders","8":"tag-2026-free-agency","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-home-centerpiece","11":"tag-home-latest-stories","12":"tag-jalen-nailor","13":"tag-las-vegas","14":"tag-las-vegas-raiders","15":"tag-lasvegas","16":"tag-lasvegasraiders","17":"tag-news-free-agency","18":"tag-nfl","19":"tag-raiders"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116260692273513734","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}