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closePHILIPSBURG — Reid Vanderlinden has always had football in his blood. He can mark time with the sport if he wants.
Like at the very start. Vanderlinden was conceived four days after Colorado opened the 1990 season. His father, Ron, was a defensive assistant for that national championship team.
“It’s been a part of my life since I was born,” Vanderlinden said this week. “They won the national championship the year I was born. That was kind of a cool deal.”
Vanderlinden, a former standout at State College, is about to embark on his own college football career at Johns Hopkins University. Before that, he will suit up for the North team in the Lezzer Lumber Classic on Saturday at Bald Eagle Area’s Alumni Stadium.
More than 70 players from 31 schools are expected to participate in the all-star game. None quite possesses a football background like Vanderlinden’s.
He went on the ride as his father served as defensive coordinator at Northwestern for four years, the head coach at Maryland for three, and linebackers coach at Penn State the last eight.
“It’s always been there with his job, moving from town to town,” Vanderlinden said. “It’s definitely helped with being in the family.”
Vanderlinden is coming off a season in which he earned All- Mid-Penn Conference honorable mention honors as a wide receiver and defensive back and helped the Little Lions to a 12-1 record and trip to the PIAA Class AAAA quarterfinals.
He also played baseball at State College. Ron recalled this week tossing pitches to Reid when he was a youngster.
One day in the backyard, Reid proposed this question: “Dad, can you be my dad and not my coach?”
The answer was easy for Ron. “The last thing I wanted to be was that overbearing father,” Ron said.
According to Reid, Ron has been far from domineering, especially when it comes to football.
Asked what ways his father has guided him in football, Reid said, “Kind of at an early age he said that he was going to be a dad first and a coach second. That’s kind of how it’s been my whole life. Coming home from practice, he’d ask me how I’m doing. I’d tell him a few things and he’d be able to point me in the right direction.”
Ron said he will be in attendance for tonight’s game. For a busy football coach, he has surprisingly been able to catch quite a few of Reid’s games over the years.
“Being here at Penn State was probably as good a situation as I could’ve been in, in that it’s a small community and Coach Paterno is very family oriented,” Ron said. “If it was at all possible for me to get to a game — baseball or football— Coach Paterno was really terrific about that. Even if I missed Friday evening meetings with the team, Coach said, ‘Go watch your son play. You’re only going to get a chance to do that once.’”
And when Ron wasn’t able to attend a game, State College coach Al Wolski made him a copy of the game film. Father and son would watch the tape together on Thursday night.
Ron would ask Reid to walk him through a few particular plays, quizzing him along the way.
“If there was an area where I could give him a little bit of guidance, I did,” Ron said. “I was careful not to over-step what he was coached to do. Again, I didn’t want it to be a film session as much as watching the game together.”
At Johns Hopkins, the 6-foot, 170-pound Vanderlinden will likely play defensive back. The Division III program went 8-3 last season and has ranked top 25 nationally by the Sporting News and Lindy’s going into 2009.
“I love Baltimore,” Reid said. “It was a pretty easy decision for me. Mostly it was school first and football second. (Ron) pointed me in the right direction as far as looking for the right coaches and a good program.”
But, as Ron said, Reid needed little guidance.
“Reid had a really mature outlook on college, starting two years ago,” Ron said. “When he was going into his junior year, we took four or five trips and went to a lot of places where I knew people in the profession. I tried really hard to take him to outstanding academic schools. His outlook was, ‘I love to play football and hopefully football will help me get into the best academic school I can get into.”
Reid also considered Ivy and Patriot league schools, which boast Football Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA) programs.
“He really felt athletically that the level that Johns Hopkins is at was probably the right level for him,” Ron said. “It’s certainly an outstanding school and they showed a lot of interest in Reid right away. They did a really good job of recruiting him. When we went down to look at the school a couple different times, we were very impressed with the staff and the school itself.”
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