Gavin Pritzkau — Quarterback, Class of 2030 — Central Florida Christian Academy, Winter Garden, Florida
Before every game for the last three years, Gavin Pritzkau has walked to a field goal post and laid a small wooden cross at the base of it. Same ritual, home or away, win or lose. Nobody asked him to do it. He just started, and then he kept going, which is a fair summary of how he approaches most things.
Football was not the first sport. Lacrosse was.
“I loved how rough lacrosse was and I loved hitting, so my parents knew I was ready for football,” the Class of 2030 quarterback said. He was seven. His dad had played, and Gavin wanted to be like him, so he went out and played every position on the field — every position except the one he plays now.
The move to quarterback happened by degrees, the way it usually does when a coach notices a kid can throw. Then, at nine years old, he took a single lesson with a local trainer named Baylin Trujillo and stopped considering alternatives.
What hooked him was not encouragement. It was the opposite.
“What I loved most about Coach Baylin was how hard he is on his QBs,” Pritzkau said. “To this day that is still what I love most about Coach Baylin and any coach I train with.”
That is an unusual thing for a middle schooler to say out loud, and it lines up with how he describes the position itself. Ask him what the job requires and he does not lead with arm talent.
“As a QB you must love leading, love pressure, love studying, love a little chaos and love your teammates,” he said. “As a QB, the harder you work for your teammates, the harder they will work for you.”
The player he studies is Tom Brady, and again the thing he picked out is not the throwing. “His mental game was insane. He calls himself a psychopath,” Pritzkau said. “I’m not there yet, but I’m getting there.”
He has had reason to build that side of it. Around eleven or twelve, Sever’s disease showed up in his feet — an inflammation of the growth plate in the heel that turns up in athletic kids in the middle of a growth spurt, and does not particularly care what the athlete had planned.
“I’m still overcoming it,” he said. “When I was in elementary school, I was fast. But then Severs showed up around 11 or 12 and it changed everything. One day it will go away.”
Three sentences, and the middle one is the hard part. He is not describing an injury he came back from. He is describing a player who used to be fast, and who now runs and walks differently than he did, and who is still in the middle of it with no date on the calendar to circle. Plenty of kids quietly stop showing up for less. He kept training with the coach who is hardest on him.
The résumé since then has been built on the parts of the position nobody has to sprint for. He has worked camps at Under Armour, FBU, Prep Redzone, You Are Athlete and Elite 11, plus college camps. His last two seasons of tackle football were both undefeated. Before that there were championships and Super Bowls, several of them the kind that came down to the final possession.
“Both seasons had really cool God stories that made them extra special,” he said of the undefeated runs.
What he wants next is not really about him. Central Florida Christian Academy is small, and Pritzkau is clear-eyed about how programs like his get treated.
“In the short term, I’m hoping our small little underdog Christian school can make some big noise in the fall,” he said. “Long term, I would love to see CFCA become a football program that athletes don’t turn away from just because it’s a ‘no name school.’ I’m waiting on God to do something crazy with CFCA, but it’s all about trusting in His timing.”
There it is twice in one questionnaire — the feet that will heal one day, and the school that will be somebody one day. A quarterback in ninth grade, playing for two things that have not arrived yet, laying a cross at the goalpost every Friday in the meantime.
The hitting is what got him into the sport. The waiting is what is making him a quarterback.
For the Pritzkau family: what a membership upgrade adds
Gavin has spent three years putting a wooden cross at the base of a goalpost where almost nobody sees him do it. The point of a Quarterback Magazine membership is the opposite problem — making sure the things he does get seen by the people who should see them, and that they keep existing after the season ends.
A membership upgrade puts custom QB Magazine graphics in his hands: designed photo pieces built around him, his number, and his school, the kind of thing that looks right on a program’s feed and in a coach’s inbox. For a player at a school still building its name, a graphic that says Central Florida Christian Academy in clean, professional type does quiet work every time it goes out.
It also changes who sees it. When Quarterback Magazine shares an athlete’s feature and graphics across its platforms, the audience is not the same audience Gavin already has. His followers are family, teammates, and people from Winter Garden who know exactly who he is. Ours is full of people who don’t yet — trainers, camp directors, coaches at the next level up, and the parents and players at the bigger programs he wants CFCA measured against.
The real value is in the repetition. One post is a nice afternoon. A published feature, a set of graphics, updates through the fall, and a profile that grows season over season turn into a body of work — so that a year or two from now, when someone hears the name Gavin Pritzkau, it is the fourth or fifth time rather than the first. Class of 2030 is a lot of runway, and runway only helps the people who start using it early.
And it keeps. Camps end, film gets replaced, undefeated seasons blur together. What gets published stays published. Years from now, the record of an ninth grader who lost his speed, kept training with the coach who pushed him hardest, and spent his middle school years trying to make a small Christian school into a name will still be there — in his own words, with his coach in it, and with the cross at the goalpost right where he put it.
More info: quarterbackmagazine.com/memberships