Football, Wrestling
Favorite athlete: J.J. Watt
Favorite team: Eagles
Favorite memory competing in sports: Team dinners before football games
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: I had all season asked all season to do a kick-off, and when I finally got my chance on Senior Night, it was a dud and went like 20 yards.
Music on my playlist: Rap and country
Future plans: I am going to play football at Kutztown
Words to live by: “There is no end to hard work.”
One goal before turning 30: I want to have a house and a family.
One thing people don’t know about me: I really like animals.
By Ed Morrone
In the age of social media, Freddie Retter represents something of a unicorn. Or, perhaps more fittingly, a fish out of water.
Retter, a senior two-way football lineman and heavyweight wrestling star at Quakertown High School, recently committed to play college football at Kutztown University. In 2022, social media platforms are crucial cogs in the recruiting machine, which makes sense given that seemingly every teenager — and human being — on the planet is glued to their smartphones.
All of them, that is, except Retter. Allow Quakertown head football coach George Banas to shed some light on Retter’s preference to live off the digital grid.
“He had to make a Twitter profile for his recruitment, and he didn’t even have a picture for it,” Banas recalled with a laugh. “My wife is the team photographer, and we sent him a picture of Freddie as a freshman as a joke, because it’s so crazy looking at him now compared to when he was a freshman. The transformation he’s made has been unbelievable. But he is not into social media and the new age technology. He loves to hunt and fish, and he is incredibly proud of the old Pathfinder that he drives. He keeps a little to himself, but he’s a neat kid to be around. That’s Freddie to a tee: he’s a throwback.
“Freddie was once asked to describe his perfect date. It was a cheeseburger and fishing. Sometimes, we can’t even get a hold of him because he won’t have his phone on him. ‘Where’s Freddie? Oh, he’s in the stream.’ At this point, you don’t even have to second guess it.”
A quick glance at Retter’s Twitter page shows a grand total of 10 tweets. They were all posted between September and November of 2021, and every single one of them is a video link containing Retter’s football highlight packages to attract the attention of college coaches.
Surely, this can’t be real, right? Kids in the 21st century spend more time on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc., than they do in their own homes, so a consultation of another source was necessary.
“Freddie’s a quiet kid, but get him talking about fishing and hunting and he’ll chew your ear off,” Quakertown head wrestling coach Kurt Handel affirmed. “He and his father love the outdoors. I got a picture last spring of a monster striper that he caught.”
Outdoor hobbies never went away, mind you, but in the age of information, teenagers spending the majority of their free time on the water and in the woods seem rarer and rarer, more resembling a pre-Facebook creation than the embodiment of a kid in the 2020s.
Retter is authentically himself, and that’s probably why he is so beloved by his coaches, teammates and teachers at Quakertown. When you’re 6-foot-3 and 255 pounds, people tend to notice you, and even more so when you march to the unique beat of your own drum, as Retter unapologetically does.
“I’ve been hunting and fishing with my dad for as long as I can remember,” Retter said. “It started with goose hunting, then we moved up to turkeys and deer. And fishing is probably our favorite thing to do together. Every year we go to a cabin in Michigan for a week to go steelhead fishing, and each summer we go to the Jersey Shore for striper fishing. I like to fish for smallmouth in the Susquehanna, too. I caught a nice striper last year that was 37 inches.”
When you play two sports that are as physically and mentally taxing as Retter does, retreating into nature becomes an absolute necessity. But make no mistake about it, the football field and wrestling mat are Retter’s other happy places, and as Banas alluded to, Retter has undergone a complete transformation, from a decent athlete with potential to a major player in the Quakertown athletics community.
First, with football, Banas knew the Retter family, so he knew coming in that Freddie was a hard worker. Banas’ first thoughts were that Retter would be an average program kid, someone who would eventually help the varsity team that may fall short of dominance. He was a starter as a sophomore, but it wasn’t until this season as a senior where Banas said Retter really made the leap as a game-changing player.
In addition to his physical size, Retter impressed with his quickness, athleticism and football intelligence. Both Banas and Handel remarked at the size of Retter’s giant hands that make your own disappear when wrapped in a handshake, and at a “lanky” 255 pounds, Retter’s lengthy arm span can move offensive and defensive linemen with relative ease.
“As a defensive end, the other team won’t run his way, which shrunk the field for us and made us a better team because of it,” Banas said. “Offensively, he pass protects so well off of the edge, and his hidden talent is snapping. His long snaps are darts that will help him get on the field sooner at the next level.”
The 2021 football season was a storybook one for Quakertown. The Panthers won the SOL Continental division with an undefeated 7-0 season and won 13 of their 14 games on the season, with the only blemish being a 58-39 loss to Garnet Valley in the district semifinals. Retter’s legend grew when he badly rolled his ankle in the first quarter of that game but refused to come out even while not functioning at full capacity. Just tape it up and keep grinding.
“I had never sprained an ankle before, so I didn’t know what happened,” Retter recalled. “The trainer said it was going to swell up badly the next day, but that it could be taped up so I could finish the game. I just said, ‘Yeah, absolutely, let’s do that.’ I wasn’t my usual self, but we had an awesome season with all the guys I’ve been playing with going back to Pop Warner. It sucked that we lost, but it was nice that I could finish the game.”
Retter got a reprieve the following week in Quakertown’s Thanksgiving game at Pennridge, a 21-0 shutout victory to end his high school football career. Again, the ankle was tender, but again, good luck convincing Retter that he was going to miss that game.
“I knew in my heart that I wasn’t going to miss that game for anything,” he said. “My ankle was pretty swollen, but I just taped it up and relied on adrenaline.”
On the wrestling mat, it also took Retter some time to truly make his mark. He wrestled four matches as a freshman, going 2-2 at 182 pounds; as a sophomore, he had more opportunities wrestling at 195, but lost almost as much as he won in posting a 21-18 record.
Handel recalled that before Retter ascended to the heavyweight weight class as a junior, he learned the ropes from Jeremy McGuigan, Quakertown’s heavyweight at the time, who posted a 43-8 record his senior year (Retter’s sophomore campaign). Once Retter learned how to wrestle as a heavyweight in the 285-pound class, the results have been staggering: over the past two seasons, Retter has wrestled 57 total matches, winning 48 of them.
“I was never small, but I went from 195 pounds as a sophomore to 240 the following year,” he said. “It was a pretty big jump, and the size and strength I put on helped me a lot. Wrestling heavyweight is a whole different style than the lower classes, which has more motion. The more patient and explosive style of heavyweight fits me better. The biggest thing is to be patient and wait for my shots, and whoever makes the fewest mistakes ends up winning. Lightweights are go, go, go, whereas this style is more opportunistic where I take what’s there for me.”
Retter’s wrestling days at Quakertown are numbered, and while he’d love to become a state champion himself, he said he is more focused on the Panthers medaling as a team, which has never happened in program history. This is just another example of Retter putting the team’s best interests before his own.
“I always try to lead by example, with the team or away from the team,” he said. “I always try to do the right thing. At practice, I run my sprints and drill hard to show the guys we’re going to come in to work and that’s how it’s going to be. We grow as a family: we celebrate our highs together, and we have each other’s backs at our low points. We work through everything together.”
As far as choosing football over wrestling in college, it was a relatively easy decision for Retter. He’s grown tired of the year-round grind wrestling requires, and in the Suburban One, the competition isn’t as strong, as Retter estimates he draws a good opponent every three weeks or so at big tournaments like Winter Mayhem (he finished second) and Escape the Rock (fourth).
Wrestling is also more of an individual activity, and Retter prefers his quiet solitude when he’s fishing or hunting. Athletically, football offers the team sport aspect of every player pulling on the same rope in unison.
“I love the training that goes into it, the physicality, playing for 40 minutes instead of six,” Retter said. “I also like the brotherhood you get to form with your teammates over the course of a long season.”
As far as Kutztown goes, Retter said he was drawn to the PSAC, the athletic conference that the school plays in, along with other familiar names such as West Chester, Bloomsburg, Shippensburg and Millersville, the latter of which Retter also considered before ultimately selecting Kutztown. The fact that school is located only 30 miles west of Quakertown is also appealing to a kid who is very close with his family.
“On my visit, I really liked the coaches and campus,” Retter said. “The energy felt good. I just knew that I could bring a lot to the table there, and potentially start soon. I want to get on the field for all of my years.”
Retter is considering both business and education as possible career paths, saying that Kutztown has strong programs in both industries. He said he may start with business, and if it doesn’t take, he might want to try teaching because he has the right temperament needed to work with kids. Business is appealing because after getting a taste of leadership responsibility in football and wrestling at Quakertown, Retter is convinced he can lead employees in a professional setting.
His coaches will miss him immensely. Both Banas and Handel said one of their favorite parts of coaching Retter is how he ends every single practice by smiling and enveloping their hand in one of his monster paws for a warm shake. By all accounts, Retter will not be an easy student-athlete to replace on or off the football field/wrestling room.
“His hand size doubles mine to the point where it just disappears,” Handel said. “One of the biggest things I’ll miss is his smile and telling me at the end of every practice, ‘You have a good day, coach.’ This program has won the league title seven years in a row, and he has been a big part of that. I’m excited to see him move on and better himself at the next level, but we are going to miss him tremendously.”
Banas concurred, but he took a more long-range view to Retter’s imminent Quakertown departure.
“Fred and his senior class set the bar high, and he’s truly going to be missed,” Banas said. “He was always my last handshake with a huge smile at every single practice. These kids though, to me, they never leave. I’ve been doing this for 12 years, plus the five years before that as defensive coordinator, and I’m still running into kids I coached 15 years ago. Some of them text me to tell me they just had their first child. It’s a long relationship that never goes away. It’s reciprocal, and we have such a bond.”
For his part, Retter heaped praises on everyone in the Quakertown community when asked what he will miss most about this place once he graduates and moves on to Kutztown. He spoke at length about the bonds he formed with his teammates, and also lauded his coaches and teachers. But, perhaps sensing he didn’t give the coaches who molded him into what he has become enough credit, Retter sent a text message immediately after a 30-minute phone interview had concluded.
“Make sure you put that I would like to thank my coaches,” he wrote.
A true throwback, in every sense of the word.
