Pinnacle QB Rattler is reveling in the national spotlight
Spencer Rattler’s biggest equipment addition this high school football season has been a microphone taped to his midsection.
A five-man camera crew follows him — from his home to Phoenix Pinnacle High School, to the team-meeting rooms, to the practice fields, to the Friday night lights.
It’s the way of the world these days for maybe the most popular high school football player in America, the nation’s No. 1-ranked senior quarterback who has received requests to follow and film him this season from ESPN, an Oklahoma outlet and local news outlets.
The Rattler family and Pinnacle have let Netflix’s documentary series, “QB1: Beyond the Lights,” come in to follow Rattler throughout the season.
It’s sort of the “Hard Knocks” of elite high school quarterbacks in the country. Rattler is part of Season 3, one of three quarterbacks in the nation followed during their last high school season before moving on to Division I college football.
“He loves the QB1 group and the attention the team is getting,” said Mike Rattler, Spencer’s dad. “It is a little much at times. It seems like we had a camera crew around every week since we returned from The Opening.”
That was early July.
Rattler, the Oklahoma commit, left the Dallas Cowboys’ training headquarters in Frisco, Texas, then as the MVP and the top quarterback in the Elite 11, something no Arizona high school quarterback had done before.
The spotlight has been attracted to Rattler since his freshman year, when he opened his varsity football career with a 56-10 loss to Chandler, an inauspicious beginning to what is winding up as a state-record-breaking career.
“I love every single part of it,” Rattler says about being followed by a camera crew all day. “I feel like the attention, all of the looks I’m getting and the team is getting, not just me, but the whole team, makes you want to perform better.
“You see the cameras and you want to put on a show.”
He did that in last week’s home opener against Gilbert Perry, passing for 415 yards and four touchdowns and running for another score in a 59-33 rout.
It catapulted Pinnacle to its first-ever No. 1 football ranking in 6A by azcentral sports, as the Pioneers now try to beat Phoenix Mountain Pointe at home on Friday. Pinnacle has never beaten Mountain Pointe in Rattler’s career.
“Of course everybody is going to say I’m 0-3 against them,” Rattler said. “They’ve been a great team every year. They’ll always be a good team. I just want to do my thing against them and hopefully come out with that ‘dub.”’
Rattler is one of the most popular high school athletes in the country. Yet he might be second in overall popularity to another Pinnacle athlete — basketball standout Nico Mannion, the red head with the big hops who, along with Rattler in the backcourt, led Pinnacle to its first state basketball title last season.
Mannion, who has reclassified from 2020 to 2019, has 181,000 Instagram followers. Rattler has 33,500 followers. Rattler, however, has a verified Twitter account with close to 14,000 followers. Mannion’s following on Twitter is closing in on 9,000.
Pinnacle football coach Dana Zupke, who has a microphone taped to his body every day by the “QB1” crew, has embraced the national-media frenzy.
“We’re not making it a big deal,” Zupke said. “We’ve got camera crews around us all the time. It’s become second-nature to the kids.”
Star in making
Local quarterback coach Mike Giovando, who has worked with Rattler since the fifth grade, was asked by a reporter in 2013 about another one of his students — then Pinnacle junior quarterback Brian Lewerke when he volunteered this:
“I’ve got a seventh grader you need to watch for. His name is Spencer Rattler. He’s special. He can really spin it. He might end up being the best quarterback in Arizona history.”
Giovando’s prediction has been about as accurate as one of Rattler’s tight spirals.
“He was not the biggest, strongest guy,” Giovando says today about Rattler (now 6-foot-2, 180 pounds), with whom he still works. “He was not a huge guy. But his arm always had a smooth motion. We helped him learn how to throw with his legs.”
In the sixth grade, Giovando had Rattler working with ninth graders.
“We always tried to challenge him as far as, ‘We are going to train you as if you’re four years older than you are,’ ” Giovando said.
Rattler has 9,635 career passing yards, 97 touchdown passes. The all-time state record for 11-man football is 10,489 yards, set by Tempe’s Emanuel Gant, from 201114.
Rattler would become only the second player in 11-man football state history to surpass 10,000 yards passing in a varsity career.