It's Officially The End Of The Phil Jurkovec Era

The Pine-Richland class of 2018 graduated high school on Friday June 1st which means that Rams quarterback Phil Jurkovec is no longer a student at Pine-Richland. For the past three years the whole school district of Pine-Richland knew that they had one the most popular athletes in the whole state in Phil Jurkovec. Phil is even considered to be one of the best multi-sport athletes ever in the WPIAL and perhaps the PIAA. While Phil was in high school he won a basketball WPIAL championship with the Rams in 2016 and 2017 and won a football WPIAL championship in 2017 as well. Pine-Richland was considered one of the best football teams in the state of Pennsylvania this past year as the Rams won the PIAA 6A football championship as well this year. Now the Rams football team won a WPIAL championship in 2014 when Jurkovec was a backup quarterback to Ben DiNucci. I'm not sure if Phil won a ring with the team that year. So perhaps he could have won four WPIAL championships in his high school career but I am not so sure.

You want to know how popular Phil is? Well let's just say he has over 6,500 followers on Instagram and over 6,600 followers on Twitter. Phil has been such a good quarterback and has gained so much popularity that his Twitter account is verified. A person can get their Twitter account verified is by Twitter giving it "to highly sought celebrities and public figures or those at risk of impersonation, to establish authenticity of identities." That means that Twitter thinks that future Notre Dame quarterback Phil Jurkovec is so popular that they should give him the blue check mark next to his name on Twitter so nobody tries to make fake accounts claiming they are Jurkovec. Any high schooler would be so excited to have their Twitter account verified that Phil had to be excited when he saw that.

With Phil now gone the Rams will have to look for a new quarterback and this summer they will figure out who their new QB for next football season will be.

Earlier this year I wrote an article about which WPIAL athletes from this year are in consideration for the most popular WPIAL athlete and I listed about 12 high school athletes who could be considered the most popular WPIAL athlete and I had Phil as one of my candidates. After I wrote that article I started thinking and realized that Phil has to be the most popular WPIAL athlete not only just this year but actually the last three years.

Phil has accomplished so much in his career at Pine-Richland as he was named 2017 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Player of the Year and was ranked the number 120th football athlete in the whole nation by ESPN. While under center for the Rams Phil he threw for 8,202 yards and rushed for 2,942 yards. In his career Phil has completed 72.8% of his passes in his career as he was 243 of 334.

Phil had a lot of offers from FBS football schools so he basically could choose where he wanted to continue his football career at. Phil had offers from Notre Dame of course, Alabama, Clemson, Michigan State, Mississippi State, Ohio State, Penn State, Pitt, UCLA, West Virginia, Wisconsin and even other schools. All those schools I listed would be dream schools for a lot of high school students that would want to go there for the education reasons or the athletic reasons.

This is just me thinking this but I feel that when former West Allegheny football player Kenny White saw how good Phil Jurkovec he realized that he had to find a way to play with him because Phil perhaps could turn him to a better player and I think Phil did turn him into a better player last season.

Phil basically did not play a single basketball game till like late December or early January of this year's basketball season and did not practice much before the first game he played this season. The fact that he was able to get his team to the 6A Boys WPIAL championship game against Penn Hills this year after not having practicing basketball that much before the first game he played this season was incredible. He was not rusty in his first game and continued playing at the same high level like he did last year showing that Phil is very athletic and knows that he has to perform great in no matter what situation. He even scored a total of 1,656 points in his basketball career.

Phil Jurkovec was a terrific high school sports athlete that will be talked about and be idolized for the rest of his life.