Genetics may have made Burrillville High’s Ryan Coffey one of the biggest male student/athletes among this year’s Rhode Island high school graduating classes, but hard work made him the best and brightest.

“It’s so rare when you have somebody with his size, talent and intellect, who also works so hard,” Burrillville football coach Mike Hauser said of Coffey.

At 6-foot-2 and 260 pounds, Coffey was one of the biggest members of last fall’s Providence Journal All-State football team. He also was one of the biggest high school hockey players in Rhode Island over the past four years and one of the largest baseball players in the state.

In football last fall, from his position on the defensive line, he made 49 solo tackles in 10 games, sacked opposing quarterbacks 6 times and also blocked 2 kicks. Last month, he closed out his high school baseball career by leading Burrillville to the Division II state championship with an MVP performance in the state tournament.

His academic performance was even more impressive than his athletic effort.

In 25 major academic courses over his four-year career, including advance placement courses in calculus, statistics, biology, English and U.S. History, Coffey compiled a 3.78 GPA on a 4.0 scale. He posted a final grade of 90 or above in 23 of the 25 courses and both of the other two marks were in the high 80s. It was the second-highest academic average in the 177-member graduating class at Burrillville this year.

That combination of athletic and academic excellence has earned Coffey selection as the 2007 Providence Journal Honor Roll Boy, the award presented annually to the top senior high school male scholar-athlete in Rhode Island

Coffey, the son of Michael and Lise-Anne Coffey, becomes the fifth Burrillville student to win the award in the 81-year history of the Honor Roll Boy program and the first Bronco to be named Honor Roll Boy since Howie Laporte captured the honor in 1959.

“He was not a kid who was looking for his name in the paper, but anything he did, he did to the best of his ability,” said Hauser. “It’s very seldom that the most intelligent kid in the class also is the hardest worker. When you get the most physically gifted and the most intellectually gifted combined with the best work ethic, it’s special.”

“He was the strongest kid in the building. He could bench-press 380 pounds but he still worked on his strength. He played three sports, so all year he would be up at 6 o’clock every morning to go to school, then go to practice every afternoon, then go down in his basement and lift after doing three hours of homework every night. Anything there is to get better, he is there.”

As an offensive and defensive football lineman, Coffey toiled in obscurity, which was fine with him.

“For me it was about the team. We knew our line was one of the biggest parts of the team. It all started with us. If we didn’t do our job, our skill players couldn’t do theirs,” Coffey said.

“Talent is only useful if you work hard at it,” Coffey continued. “My coach [Hauser] would say ‘Hard work beats talent, if talent doesn’t work hard.’ ”

Burrillville coaches and teacher never had to worry about Coffey not working to perfect his talents.

In his senior year, he earned individual honors in all three of his sports — All-State in football and all-division in both hockey and baseball. For him, however, the most satisfying aspect of his athletic career was helping Burrillville teams win state championships in all three sports — the 2005 Division III football title, the 2004-2005 Division II hockey championship and this year’s Division II baseball crown. A first basemen in baseball, it was his five hits in seven plate appearances in the two games of the Division II state title series that played a major role in Burrillville winning its first state baseball title in 42 years.

“They were special moments that I will never forget,” Coffey said of the state championships.

His performance in the classroom also earned him a host of awards.

He was the recipient of the Burrillville Harvard Book award, the Rensselaer math medal, the Bausch and Lomb science award and an AP Scholar Award. The vice president of this year’s senior class at Burrillville, he was a member of the National Honor Society as well as the Student Technology Association and the Dead Poet’s Society. As a junior, he was named his class’s Most Outstanding Student in both Spanish and English.

In May, he was honored as one of the National Football Foundation-Rhode Island Chapter’s Scholar/Athlete Golden Dozen and was awarded one of the Chapter’s two major scholarship. He also received a Rhode Island Elks National Foundation Scholarship and Smithfield Emblem Club Community Scholarship.

“Growing up, he was always the biggest kid in town,” said Hauser, “but he always worked at getting better in everything he did.” “I remember his sixth-grade teacher telling me, ‘I have been teaching for 25 years and he is the best writer I have ever seen.’ ”

“I guess I have always been that way in both school and sports,” said Coffey, who plans to play football and baseball at Wesleyan University. “I always wanted to get better no matter what steps were needed to get there.”

jgillool@projo.com