Poko's Man For All Seasons
Poquoson senior Chad Pinder, who made All-District in basketball and All-State in baseball last season, added football to his repertoire for his senior year this season. Photo by Jason Norman
America's best football players just might see their season stretch five months - and that's only the top few teams.
Chad Pinder just laughs.
If pro baseball and basketball players are lucky enough to get into the championships, their season still only lasts about seven or eight months.
But don't complain to the Poquoson senior.
Because every school year (and for much of the educational off-season) he does the same things as all of them - and for ZERO times the million-dollar paychecks!
"I just love activities and I love competing," says Pinder, who just helped his school to the Bay Rivers District title game. "I love sports. I've been that way since I was born."
Since he stepped through the doors of Poquoson High just over four years ago, Pinder has been a standpoint on the school basketball team - he was voted one of the Bay Rivers District's top shooting guards last season. But his true passion has always been the diamond, and it showed last June, when the Islanders brought home the school's second state championship.
Still, on the rare occasions that Pinder could get away from his summer-fall travel league squad to watch Islander gridiron games for the last three years, he couldn't help but feel like there might be something missing.
"When I went, I wished I was out there," he remembers. "I wondered how I'd do. I didn't want to regret it later on in life." That's why, this past fall, Pinder decided to put one notch in his overflowing "High School Accomplishments" column.
"We wanted him out here for a while," says coach Elliott Duty, who also coaches Pinder in baseball. "If you get your shortstop to come out for football, you know you're going to have an athlete. With his competitiveness and work ethic, I knew he'd be an asset. No matter what he does, if you put him on the mound or the football field, he's going to be competitive."
Rather than a small, dirt-burning sphere, Pinder had to learn to catch a large, weirdly-shaped contraption during his wide receiver training sessions. But it didn't take him long to put his skills to work; he scored his team's only touchdown in a season-opening loss at Dinwiddie, then hit pay dirt again a week later as his squad defeated Lafayette in its home opener.
"I didn't know what to do," he says of his after-score feelings. "I was really excited. There's nothing like it that compares in baseball. It was exciting to hear crowd go crazy, and just to prove to myself that I could play football."
It's quite a different kind of proof than he learned on the fields and courts.
"The physicality (is the toughest part)," he says. "Baseball players aren't used to much contact, and in basketball, there's a little contact, but there's nothing like football. The mental and physical toughness that I've learned will help me out a lot."
He and his baseball friends will need the help (after basketball, of course!); after going 28-1 last year (their only loss was to local rival Grafton in the district tournament), every squad in the state wants to be the one to stop a repeat.
Not that the Islanders are quaking in their cleats - Pinder, who intends to continue his baseball career at Virginia Tech, was voted one of the state's top shortstops last season (he was on base when Poquoson scored in the bottom of the last inning to edge Campbell County's Rustberg 4-3), and he's not the only returnee.
"I have a lot of confidence in our team this year," he says. "There's a lot of guys coming back and a lot of young guys moving up."
Of course, not all of Pinder's assets are on the field - not even including his 3.7 grade point average (he hopes to one day become an orthodontist) or memberships in several school organizations.
"It's been a blessing just to be on the other side of the white lines, watching your son play the game you always played yourself," says his father Chris, who pitched in the minors for Baltimore and Cleveland. "He's so much better than I ever was. It's not even a comparison; I was a pitcher. I never could hit very well."
Perhaps that's why Chris never pushed him too hard to follow in his cleated footsteps, Pinder claims.
"Not at all," he says. "My dad's always been supportive of everything I wanted to do. He's definitely been the biggest factor in my baseball career. He's helped me out more than anybody has. He said he never got nervous pitching, but when he watches me pitch, it's a whole new level of nervousness."
For the time being, however, he won't be thinking about strapping on a glove, picking up a bat, or deciding between a hanging curve and a fastball low and on the outside corner.
"I miss it a lot," Pinder says of baseball. "I haven't seen live pitching in a couple months, and that's the longest I've gone in my life. I can't wait to get back on the diamond."
