Colton Gumino is a 17-year-old high school student, but he’s already running an NFL-style offense.
The Hersey senior quarterback is ahead of the game academically too. Gumino, a UCLA recruit, intends to graduate early.
“I’m excited to go to classes and see what it’s like to be a college student as a 17-year-old kid,” he said. “UCLA feels like home for me.”
The 6-foot-2, 192-pound Gumino has been Hersey coach Tom Nelson’s star student for three seasons.
“We run a sophisticated offense, so we ask a lot of (Gumino),” Nelson said. “It’s no different from what you would see for an NFL quarterback.”
Nelson, a Hersey graduate, played in the NFL. So he knows what he’s talking about.
“(Gumino’s) making sure people are in the right spots, getting the cadence right, the motions, the shifts,” Nelson said. “There’s just a lot going on at the quarterback position, so a lot of his energy is directed at making sure that we’re in the right place.”
Gumino, who has completed 95 of 144 passes for 1,741 yards and 15 touchdowns and rushed for 533 yards and 12 TDs for the playoff-eligible Huskies (5-3) this season, committed to UCLA in June. Florida also offered him a scholarship, making his decision a difficult one. But UCLA, a new member of the Big Ten, came with two major bonuses.
Two sets of Gumino’s aunts, uncles and cousins live in Pasadena, within a stone’s throw of the Rose Bowl. Gumino also will get to train under UCLA offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, who spent six seasons in the same position with the Kansas City Chiefs, mostly with Patrick Mahomes as his quarterback. Bieniemy has two Super Bowl rings.
“I don’t know too many coaches that coached Patrick Mahomes,” Gumino said. “He knows what it takes to develop quarterbacks, so I trust him. He says he runs a lot of the similar stuff that we run.”
Gumino has become proficient in the pro-style offense, but that wasn’t the case when he was a sophomore in 2022.
“Sometimes, you just want to cry,” he said. “I’d sit down and be like, ‘What am I doing, writing down all of these plays at 10:30 at night on a Sunday?’”
Gumino split reps at quarterback that season. He needed to get a handle on the complex system.
“There’s a lot of terminology, and it’s harder on the quarterback, who has to spit out the play,” Nelson said. “There’s a lot of remembering, a lot of understanding how these puzzle pieces fit in.”
Gumino eventually became a guru.
“Colton absorbs things really well,” Hersey junior running back Brandon Jenkins said. “He knows the playbook like the back of his hand. I honestly don’t know how he does it.”
Here’s how: Gumino spent many hours writing play calls on his whiteboard — like “plus, south right clamp, lake, wizard right push, H pearl” — and going to his backyard to run through them by himself.
“I’ll call the play and visualize it,” Gumino said. “Then I’ll run it and think, ‘What am I processing before the play happens? What am I doing?’
“I think that really helped me the last three years of my high school experience, and I’ll probably take that with me to UCLA.”
Gumino’s effort paid off exceedingly well last season. He passed for 2,488 yards and 35 touchdowns while completing 72% of his throws as Hersey went 10-1 and qualified for the Class 7A playoffs.
“He’s grown a lot,” Nelson said. “The physical piece is probably one of the most noticeable things, but then there’s the mental side of things and understanding football at a higher level, understanding what really the position entails.”
As a result, Gumino transformed from a self-described “little recruit,” with interest from smaller programs in the Mid-American and Missouri Valley conferences, into a big-time prospect.
Gumino will head to UCLA in three months with that quasi-NFL offensive mind.
“I’m very lucky to be in an offensive system like this because you don’t really see it too often,” he said. “But my best game has yet to come. I’m still waiting for that spark. It’s there. I see it a lot this year, and I can’t wait to continue in college.”
Sam Brief is a freelance reporter.
