It may be ski season, but Glastonbury’s Jack Petrone is still playing football
Jack Petrone should be skiing now.
He was supposed to leave for Killington Mountain School in Vermont Monday. But his Glastonbury football team, sixth-seeded in Class LL, beat third-seeded West Haven in the state quarterfinals Tuesday night 17-7.
So Petrone is still playing football.
Petrone is a senior running back/linebacker for the Guardians, who will travel to face No. 2 seed Greenwich Sunday at 12:30 p.m. in the Class LL semifinal game. He has rushed for 1,929 yards, second in the state according to MaxPreps, and 21 touchdowns, averaging 175 yards a game through the season against opponents like Maloney and Southington.
“I think he’s the best football player in the state of Connecticut this year,” Glastonbury coach Eric Hennessy said.
Petrone is also a national junior champion in mogul skiing. He won the U18 title at the US Ski and Snowboard Freestyle Junior Nationals in March and as soon as football season ends, he will be on a plane to Canada to train with the U.S. junior mogul team.
But his mind is completely on football right now.
“My saying is, ‘Whatever my season is, that’s my favorite sport,’” Petrone said. “So when somebody asks me, ‘I go, it’s football season, football is my favorite sport.’ Whenever it’s that season, I do that work, I put in all the work I can for that season.”
Glastonbury (9-2) has won its last three games, including an upset of then-unbeaten Maloney, the defending Class L champion, 28-21 in overtime, on Nov. 10.
Petrone had 24 carries for 110 yards and three touchdowns in that game. Earlier in the season, he scored five touchdowns and rushed for 264 yards in a win over NFA. Against West Haven Monday, he rushed for 138 yards and was a key player on defense.
“He’s not going to blow you away with his speed but he’s just patient,” Hennessy said. “He lets the block set up; his vision and reaction to the block is what makes him special.
“He never leaves the field. He plays at an All-State level at linebacker. Sometimes we pull him off to give him a break and he gets mad at us.”
Petrone has played football since second grade but has skied since he was 2. His parents met at Killington and the family went there every weekend in the winter as he grew up.
“I never liked racing, I thought it was boring,” he said. “I wanted to do the flips, the jumps, the rails.”
Eventually he gravitated toward moguls. In competition, the skiers negotiate a moguls course with two jumps in the middle and the scoring is based on speed and degree of difficulty of the jumps.
“I like the adrenaline rush, going fast,” he said.
He spends the summer training at Mt. Hood in Oregon, at Killington, or in Lake Placid, practicing jumps into a pool. He comes back for football in the fall, goes to Killington Mountain School for the winter, then returns to Glastonbury to play baseball in the spring.
Because he trains at a high level in skiing, he is able to translate that to high school sports as well.
“Jack’s a kind of the silent leader,” Hennessy said. “[His teammates] look at his example and say this is how it’s supposed to be.
“To be a national champion in anything, you have to have that mindset, you understand that it’s daily improvement. That’s one of our mantras here: One percent better every day. He’s at that next level where he decided I’m going to get better at something every single day.”
But after ski season, Petrone will have to make a decision and choose one: football or skiing. He would like to play football in college. He would like to make the Olympic team in moguls. He can’t do both.
“The goal is definitely the Olympics,” he said. “But I have to pick. It’s going to be my last time doing one of them. I have no idea which one.
“After the ski season I’ll decide. If I do good enough in the ski season, I might qualify for the U.S. [senior] team, and that’s a whole ‘nother story.”
Lori Riley can be reached at lriley@courant.com.
