Three years ago, after his freshman year of junior varsity football at Oakland Mills, quarterback David Pindell didn’t expect a lot from his high school career.
He had never played organized football before and playing quarterback proved much tougher than he had expected.
“It looked easy on TV,” Pindell said, “but when you actually play it with all the linemen coming at you and the pressure coming at you — I never thought it would be like that. My freshman year, I couldn’t deal with that, because every game, I didn’t feel comfortable and I didn’t feel like I was doing good.”
Scorpions coach Thomas Browne, however, saw the athleticism, big arm and keen mind that, with the proper guidance and a lot of hard work, could turn Pindell into a top-notch high school quarterback and possibly a Division I college football player.
With that confidence in his potential, Pindell immediately set out to crush the learning curve — and he did. Last fall, he threw for 2,447 yards and 23 touchdowns and was The Baltimore Sun’s Offensive Player of the Year after the Scorpions (9-2) posted their first winning season in more than a decade.
Saturday night, Pindell will complete his high school football career by leading defending champion Team Maryland against Pennsylvania’s top seniors in the 58th Big 33 Football Classic at Hersheypark Stadium in Hershey, Pa.
“It’s a big opportunity for me,” Pindell said. “It’s big competition. I look at it like it’s my first college game, so I want to get used to the game speed, the linemen and get used to quickly playing. I’m looking forward to meeting my host family and having a good time.”
While some of the area’s top players can’t participate in the Big 33 game because they have to leave for college before this week, Pindell was on the Team Maryland coaching staff’s radar all along.
“There was no doubt he was going to be our first guy,” coach Sean Murphy said of his wish list of quarterbacks.
Murphy, the coach at Archbishop Curley, saw Pindell at Crab Bowl practice in December and pegged him for the Big 33 — and not just because he excels at delivering the deep ball.
“Not only does he have a strong arm, but David’s really athletic. He can run, ” Murphy said. “If there’s a breakdown in protection or they do a good job covering our kids in the secondary, David can just make a play with his legs. He’s such an athlete that he can turn a loss into a 20-yard gain.”
Being a relative newcomer to the sport, Pindell can thank his work ethic for his success.
He had a lot of ground to make up never having played an organized sport until high school, but he knew he was athletic. He always excelled in field day races in elementary and middle school and he played all the pick-up sports he could.
That wasn’t easy because his mother kept all seven of her children close to the house. He couldn’t even go down the street to the basketball court, so the neighborhood children convened in the parking lot in front of his house and played two-hand touch.
Pindell said he liked catching the ball best. After struggling at quarterback his freshman year, he longed to be a receiver. Browne convinced him otherwise.
During the offseason, the coach worked with him as much as he could within MPSSAA rules, and Pindell took it from there.
“I watched YouTube videos on quarterback training every day,” Pindell said, “and I’d just take it to the field the next day and try to learn from it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Just get better with it, with coach Browne teaching me the basics like reading the defense and the footwork and stuff.”
Browne was impressed that Pindell put in so much work on his own.
“Between his freshman and sophomore year, he took a big jump, because he was out there throwing every single day,” Browne said. “He could throw the ball a mile. His mechanics were poor, but he started a trend here where kids work on their game year-round and he improved a great deal on his own. He was a totally different player.”
As Pindell gained the knowledge to slow the game down in his mind, he learned, over the next few years, to make instant decisions pre-snap and post-snap in the Scorpions’ read option.
He moved up from JV in October of his sophomore year and threw for 375 yards in his first varsity start. The next spring, he got serious about the game, he said, after former Maryland offensive line coach Tom Brattan told him he had the potential to play at a high level.
As Pindell’s understanding and confidence grew, so did a Scorpions program struggling to recover from a 2003 grade-fixing scandal that all but destroyed it.
His junior year, Oakland Mills won four games after winning just 17 games in the previous nine seasons. Last fall, the Scorpions made the playoffs for the first time in 11 years.
Browne gives Pindell much of the credit for putting Oakland Mills back on the football map — not just for his on-field leadership and his ability to throw the ball and run it (924 yards rushing for 21 touchdowns last fall), but also for being an offseason role model, something the program had not had in years.
“We came in here together [four years ago],” Browne said, “and there were no kids that busted their butts all year round, that asked to borrow a football and work out in the field. We had three guys in the weight room. David and some guys in the class above him [Dershone Hayman and Javonte Rose] are the guys who created a new norm. David’s just absolutely a leader in making that happen and I can’t put a price on that. The thing what I will always be thankful for and appreciate about David is just his commitment to Oakland Mills football.”
Pindell aims to play Division I football, but he will detour through two-year Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pa. He committed to South Carolina State, but his SAT score wasn’t high enough when combined with his 2.5 overall GPA to meet the NCAA qualifying standard. He admits he didn’t apply himself academically until he learned how important grades were to playing in college. He brought his senior-year GPA up to a 3.2 with a 3.43 in his final semester.
Pindell hopes to win the starting job at Lackawanna, take advantage of the school’s academic support system and use both to move on to Division I. The coaches at South Carolina State are still interested in him as are those at Buffalo and Coastal Carolina.
In the meantime, he’ll try to put a big finish on his high school career as the latest Scorpion to play in the Big 33 game after Marcus Lewis, now the Marriotts Ridge football coach, and Andre Vaughn, who played in 1988; and Archie Clark in 1990.
twitter.com/kdunnsun
