Q&A: Elkhart head coach Josh Shattuck discusses everything Rodney McGraw

Ryan Snyder: To start, can you just discuss your background with Rodney? How long have you known him? How many years did he play high school ball? Just looking for some basics.

Josh Shattuck: Rodney moved to Elkhart his freshman year. He is a Chicago kid. We're about an hour-and-a-half, two hours from Chicago. He moved here between his eighth grade and ninth grade year, which happened to be my first year here and our coaching staff as well. So, we kind of came in at the same time. He was probably 6-3, maybe a 190-pound freshman that could barely tie his own shoes. He only played freshman football for us that year, but he made a couple plays in freshman games that had us thinking, "oh my gosh, this kid is going to be really good." Just running plays down on the backside and showing pure athleticism. He was really impressive, and this was also around the time where he could barely get in his stance. But he was a D-lineman from day one and he played five-technique for us. We knew if he could get in the weight room and get him committed to football, he had a chance to be special. He had never played a down of football before that. He didn't play Pop Warner ball or anything like that, so he didn't even know what he didn't know. Then, come his sophomore year, he sprouted up to about 6-4 and played at about 205, so he was still really skinny, but he got so much better as the season went on. He became an all-conference player as a sophomore, and we play in a pretty big league here, so that's when the offers started rolling in after his sophomore year, around January or February. He then sprouted up to about where he is now, 6-foot-5, ahead of his junior year, and he played around 225. Then, this year, he grew to 255, so he's really grown a lot physically the past two seasons.