Shadle Park quarterback inspires confidence
Good things come in small packages, blah, blah, blah.
It’s not that there isn’t some truth in that cliché, but Shadle Park High School football coach Mark Hester has a different take on the fact that his starting quarterback this season, Branden Hughes, goes about 5-foot-7, 150 pounds.
“I think people get caught up in the numbers too much,” Hester said recently. “Quarterbacks don’t spend that much time looking over people. If a guy knows the routes and where his receivers are going to be, he’ll find them.
“Branden’s a good athlete, a good student, and he comes from a great home. He’s got a lot of confidence in himself, and the other players and the coaches have a lot of confidence in him as well. He’s a great leader, and I don’t anticipate doing much of anything different because of his size.”
This will be Hughes’ third varsity season, and he was a two-way starter as a junior, at strong safety and running back. He’s also on pace to earn three baseball letters, having started in the infield for the Highlanders during both his sophomore and junior seasons.
He was the starting quarterback for an outstanding Shadle freshman team three seasons ago but switched to running back his sophomore season.
“For a while there, he started believing the naysayers who were telling him he’s too small to play quarterback,” Hester said.
But things changed last spring when one of Shadle’s QB candidates learned he’d be moving from Spokane this fall, and the field was suddenly wide open.
“Branden actually came in to volunteer to move back to quarterback,” said the coach. “I think some of the kids had talked with him about it, and we knew what kind of athlete he is, so things would be OK. When he came in, I told him that I’d have been coming to him about it if he hadn’t.”
Hughes, who loves playing on the other side of the ball too, did manage to persuade Hester to keep him in the defensive back rotation and looks forward to the challenge of relearning his former offensive position.
“The big difference for me this year is that I’ll have responsibility for more guys,” Hughes said. “It may be a challenge sometimes throwing the ball from the pocket, but we’ve got some rollout and bootleg packages where I have a run-pass option.”
Ask baseball coach Ron Brooks about Hughes, and you’ll find out he’s on the same page as Hester.
“Branden’s a dedicated, hard-nosed player,” Brooks said. “He’s the kind of kid everyone wants to play with and that coaches want to be around. You know he’ll always play as hard as he can, and he brings the same work ethic to the field that he has in the classroom and in the gym.”
About that classroom work ethic – Hughes has a 4.0 grade-point average and is on track to share academic honors as valedictorian of his class of 2007. Among his courses this year will be advanced placement biology, pre-calculus, chemistry and college prep English.
As much as he enjoys football, Hughes knows that baseball’s a more likely avenue for his athletic future, and he hopes to play at some level after he’s done at Shadle.
So it turns out that the bottom line on Hughes isn’t a tale of the tape measure or the scales. It’s the respect he’s earned from his peers and coaches and the leadership responsibilities upon which he thrives. In all the ways that really count, he’s a giant.