An early enrollee typically arrives on campus during January, just before the start of the spring semester. Mason Heintschel hasn’t arrived on the Pitt campus just yet, but he’s already practicing with the team.
Heintschel — a 6-foot-2, 220-pound quarterback from Clay High in Oregon, Ohio — is with the Panthers in Detroit this Christmas, practicing with the team in preparation for the GameAbove Sports Bowl.
It’s not too common for early enrollees to arrive in time for bowl practices, but considering the proximity to Detroit from Oregon, Ohio, just about an hour, it worked out for him to get some bowl practices in with his new teammates.
Pitt and Toledo are slated to kick off in the GameAbove Sports Bowl on Dec. 26 at 2 p.m. at Ford Field, and Heintschel will be there. And while he isn’t going to play in the game, it will be his first taste of college football.
Heintschel signed with Pitt earlier this month, deciding to stick with his initial commitment to the Panthers and pledge himself to Pat Narduzzi, Kade Bell and the Panthers.
While other programs may have realized late in the process that Heintschel was way better than advertised, Pitt knew from the beginning. That’s why the coaching staff felt comfortable extending him his first Power Four offer — and accepting his commitment back in March. It went both ways though.
Pitt saw the potential in Heintschel, and Heintschel felt the love from Pitt. It meant a lot that the coaching staff told him straight up that he was the top target in the class. And it wasn’t just offensive coordinator Kade Bell either.
“We watched every single kid as a whole entire offensive staff,” Bell said Wednesday. “We sat down and watched every single kid. We all rated them, we wanted to make sure that we all saw the same thing, right? And the funniest thing is, out of all the quarterbacks we watched in the entire country, it doesn’t matter if it’s three-star, four-star, five-star, when we put our ratings together, Mason was the highest-rated guy on our board.”
Heintschel was excellent as a junior at Clay High, a small school in northwest Ohio. He produced huge numbers of a subpar squad, and while he had offers to join just about any private high school in the area, he turned them down.
He stayed at Clay all four years and led the Eagles to their first League title in 42 years as a senior, racking up 3,200 total yards and 41 total touchdowns.
His loyalty speaks to who Heintschel is as a quarterback — and a person.
It was secondary coach Archie Collins who initially identified Heintschel, and that relationship grew from Collins to Bell, and eventually the entire coaching staff. Pitt found him early, he visited and immediately fell in love with the program. That’s what mattered in the end.
