Easy adjustment
A good deal has changed in the three years Danny Marshall spent away from football.
The last time the East Valley High School senior wide receiver played the game, he was a 5-foot-10, middle school quarterback.
Today, he’s a 6-6 wide receiver.
“I’ve always loved football,” Marshall admitted. “I spend a lot of time watching football, but when I got to high school I decided I wanted to concentrate on my basketball.”
When it came time to start thinking about playing basketball at the next level, Marshall started to rethink playing the game other game he loves.
“Our quarterback, Lonnie Quirk, spent a lot of time trying to talk me into playing again because we play a lot of touch football together and stuff like that,” he said. “We’re pretty good together.
“At the same time, it’s been a little different. Before, I was the quarterback and he was the receiver. In the meantime, Lonnie and I have become really good friends and have been teammates all along in basketball.”
Marshall said his decision to turn out for football had as much to do with basketball.
“I got to thinking about possibly going on and playing basketball somewhere,” he said. “It seemed to me that playing football might be a way of improving my profile for college coaches.”
It helped to have seen Washington State University basketball standout Mike Bush have a major impact on the Cougar football squad as a 6-6 senior wide receiver in 2001.
The prospect of having a 6-6 wideout had East Valley coach Adam Fisher excited from the first day of turnout.
“We had Danny out for spring practice in June and he really picked things up fast,” Fisher said. “He’s a smart player. He understood what we were trying to do right away.”
Wide receivers are considered tall if they reach 6-feet. Seattle Seahawk standouts Deon Branch and Bobby Engram are 5-9 and 5-10, respectively. Considered tall for a cornerback, Seattle’s Marcus Trufant is just 5-11.
“From a standing start Danny can get up in the air 11 feet,” Fisher said. “There is nobody in this league who can cover him. Some teams have tried to cheat a safety over to his side, but that leaves our flanker, Dakota Lawson, in one-on-one coverage and that helps him.
“We’re still a running team. We’re going to look to run the ball until you stop us. Having a target like Danny who can get up in the air really forces teams to respect the pass.”
A major adjustment Marshall is learning to make is to his new height. Since arriving at East Valley, he’s sprung up seven inches – two since last winter’s basketball season.
“It certainly changes my game having this extra height,” he said. “Playing football will help with that. What I do is a lot like basketball. You have to be able to play in the air and you have to be used to catching balls in traffic.”
In other words, making the adjustment to football has been easy. The conditioning, he said, has been a challenge, but it will only serve to get into better shape come basketball season. Learning the plays, however, was a snap.
“That was really easy for me,” he said. “Like I said, I love football and watch a lot of it, so understanding the plays was never a problem. Lifting weights and learning how to be explosive off the line will only help my basketball game.
“I think it helps that I had played before. It all came back to me very quickly.”
The Quirk-to-Marshall passing combination clicked from day one. They connected on a 15-yard touchdown pass and the team’s first score of the season, and later on a 33-yard strike in the team’s 40-16 win over Rogers.
Marshall pulled in a 16-yard pass for a touchdown against Ferris and had scoring receptions of 36 and 35 yards, respectively, against North Central.
“The fact that Lonnie and I have been such good friends and have played together so much, we really have a good connection,” Marshall said. “I see what he sees and I know what he’s going to do. We really are on the same page and have great, I guess you’d have to call it chemistry, together.”
The only game in which Marshall was denied a touchdown reception and held to fewer than four receptions was last week against Mead, where he grabbed two for 45 yards. In that game, Quirk went down with a knee injury.
Through four games, Marshall is the Greater Spokane League’s second leading receiver with 15 catches for 274 yards. His five catches for touchdowns and a catch to complete a two-point conversion against North Central have him fourth in scoring going into Friday’s cross-Valley showdown at Central Valley.
“I asked Danny a couple games ago, after he’d already caught five touchdown passes, if he was having fun playing football,” Fisher said. “He’s kind of a quiet kid and doesn’t say a whole lot. He just smiled and said ‘yeah.’ “