by Lem Satterfield
Edmondson's Nick Speller, a 6-foot-5, 300-pound two-way lineman, who was recruited as an offensive tackle, announced to DigitalSports today at a noon press conference that he has accepted a full athletic scholarship to play for Syracuse University.
"I chose to go there because I think I had the best opportunity at playing time," Speller said at the press conference on Tuesday. "The depth chart is a perfect fit for me...especially me coming in for spring ball, I'm going to have the upper hand over everybody else."
Edmondson coach Dante Jones said Speller had drawn interested from Georgia, Pittsburgh, Hofstra, Maryland, Towson and Delaware State, but that "it came down to Syracuse, Hofstra, Delaware State and Maryland, and he chose Syracuse."
Speller, who in the fall of 2006, helped to lead the Red Storm to a 13-1 record and the Class 2A state title, also had full scholarship offers from Hofstra and Delaware State.
Speller had been an anchor on the state title-winning Red Storm squad, which gained more than 3,500 yards of total offense, with a significant amount of that coming from running back Tariq Jones' 1,957 rushing yards and 16 TDs.
Although still a student, academically, at Edmondson, Speller's football-playing eligibility had been exhausted prior to the start of the 2007 season, hence, he was not a member of this year's Class 2A North Region finalist Red Storm.
"What happened was that we found out in August that when he transferred from Douglass, the coach over there alerted me to the fact that Nick had played a year over there that we weren't sure about," Jones said.
"Once that information came, and we investigated and confirmed that that was the case, then we moved on to the next step," said Jones, whose assistant coach, Jason Murphy, graduated from Edmondson, earned All-Metro Defensive Player of the Year honors, and starred as an offensive lineman at Virginia Tech clearing the way for Marcus Vick.
"We put a highlight film together of the state championship season, and a lot of clips of him working out with Jason Murphy," Jones said. "We started video taping them working out together, which was probably a major selling point. We showed him doing bag drills, different footwork drills, different blocking techniques against Jason, such as reach-blocking and his pulling technique."
Six members of the Class 2A state title-winning team enrolled at Bowie State following their championship season, including defensive back Sterling Jones, linebacker Kyle Jackson, running back Tariq Jones, and linemen Dujuan Smith, Jerome Baskerville and Jonathan Mason.
"This is a dream come true for a young man coming from Baltimore City. When you get to go to an institution like Syracuse, that's major," said Jones, who completed his third coaching season. "That state championship team paved the way for a lot of things that are going to happen with our program. That gave us credibility. Now people take our record more serious. You can tell that that was the case right here."
