Pantelis, young Bulldogs grow into challengers for Ivy crown

Yale plays its biggest football game of the year (at least until next week) Saturday at Princeton, and some young Bulldogs have had to grow up on the field quickly to get the team to this point, tied for first in the Ivy League with two games to go.

As coach Tony Reno knows, though, it’s not only on the field where they have to grow up.

“There’s two forces you can’t really control when young guys come in,” Reno said on the team’s weekly media availability. “One is the academic piece of Yale, just getting acclimated to the academic environment, which is no small thing. Then the other one is picking up the playbook at the speed you need to be able to allow your athletic ability to go.”

Freshman receiver David Pantelis seems to be taking care of the latter pretty well as the Bulldogs prepare for Saturday’s game (1 p.m., ESPN+), honored both nationally and locally.

How has he handled that first part?

“I kind of set myself up to take the lightest course load possible during the season,” Pantelis said.

“I took summer classes to help me out in the fall, and it’s been a lot easier. Moving forward, like, a lot of the older guys, they told me what to do and what classes to take during the fall, just so my workload wouldn’t be as as hard.”

He’ll ramp up the academic load, he said, in the spring. But like the veterans helped him plan his class schedule, they’ve helped him with football homework as well.

“Melvin Rouse, he’s kind of just been keeping me in his footsteps, teaching me really everything that he knows and helping me along with the playbook,” Pantelis said. “He’s been really a great role model and just giving us a helping hand into, like, learning the playbook, going through routes, even when the coaches aren’t there.”

In last week’s 63-38 trackmeet victory at Brown, Pantelis scored back-to-back touchdowns for the Bulldogs, one picking up a Nolan Grooms fumble and taking it to the end zone, another on a reception from Grooms.

And getting his first shot to return kickoffs, with four returns of over 30 yards, Pantelis was named the Stats Perform National Freshman of the Week and earned Ivy League special teams player of the week as well.

Pantelis, from Pittsburgh, followed in his brother’s footsteps at Upper St. Clair High School; Chris Pantelis is a junior receiver at Johns Hopkins.

The brothers also played basketball, and David was part of a memorable game in the state playoffs during the weird COVID year of 202021: All his team’s coaches and all but six players were in quarantine or in the protocols as the game began. One of his brother’s friends coached the team; one player was banged up during the game.

They won.

“We were kind of just looking at that game like it’s just another game,” Pantelis siad. “We were just having fun with it, really. And we were just looking at all the players that couldn’t play it, just playing for them.

“And we ended up coming out on top. And then the next game we were able to get a couple of those players back and the last game we were able to play with that and enjoy the time with them.”

Saturday’s game at Princeton Stadium will be, for all intents and purposes, a playoff game. Princeton (7-1, 4-1 Ivy, with Penn next week), Yale (5-3, 4-1, hosting Harvard in a week) and Dartmouth (7-1, 4-1, facing Cornell on Saturday and Brown next week) all control their own destiny for at least a share of the Ivy title.

Yale has been without star senior running back Zane Dudek since midseason, and Princeton is without its own star senior back: Collin Eaddy tweeted earlier this week that he had surgery after suffering an injury early in the Tigers’ loss to Dartmouth.

Getting key plays from backups or players filling in, even young ones, is nothing new for the Bulldogs.

“What happens a lot of times, (young) guys are thinking while they’re playing. They don’t realize it, but they’re playing a lot slower,” Reno said. “As they understand things at a higher level and a deeper level there, they get a call, and they go out and execute it, and they execute at a 200 level, not a 100 level.

“David and, there’s some other guys that (it’s) their first time on a varsity field, you’re starting to see their true ability because they’re executing things at a really high level.”