Turtledroppings.com – Maryland Football And Basketball Blog

I wasn’t lying about the 2008 class being OL heavy.  Next in our Meet the Newbies is another Offensive Lineman, Bennett Fulper.  Bennett comes to Maryland via Gretna, Virginia.  Now I pride myself in knowing my geography, but I have to admit I have never heard of Gretna, VA.  So I broke out my US Atlas.  Gretna, VA is located about 120 miles West Southwest of Richmond.  It is located in Pittsylvania County, that sounds more like a Pennsylvania County than Virigina County, but it’s in the Old Dominion.  Pittsylvania County is on the North Carolina border and it’s best known town is Danville, which you may or may not have heard of.

At any rate, Bennett played football for Gretna High School and lettered all four years.  While in HS he also played both offensive and defensive line.  Now I’m going out on a limb on this one.  I’m thinking Gretna is a very small town.  It’s population is 1,257, which makes me surprised that they even have a High School.  But I like this.  If you look back at our recent history, a lot of our greatest players came from small schools.  The best example I can think of is both Henderson Brothers playing for Aberdeen which was an “A” school, that drew very little recruiting attention.  It is very easy for kids like Bennett Fulper to fly under the radar, so my hopes for him are very high.

Bennett checks in at 6′ 4″ and 285 pounds.  In 2008 he was on the Virginia Group A all State Team.  Though listed as an incoming OL, Ralph Friedgen hopes that Fulper will one day take over the Center duties.  If he doesn’t it won’t be because of academic ineligibilty.  Fulper had a 4.2 GPA in High School and plans on majoring in Engineering. 

What also intregues me about Bennett is that he was born on July 26th 1990.  Now there is nothing extremely interesting in that (unless maybe that is your birthday too), but he was born in Gretna.  How often do you see someone’s birth place as a town with only 1,200 people?  I mean usually you travel to a town that is big enough for a hospital when you have a kid.  It would make sense that Bennett was born in Danville, since that is the closest town that probably has a hosptial, but being born in Gretna makes you wonder if Bennett Fulper was born in a hospital at all.  I would love to dig into this more, there sounds like there could be a good story there somewhere.

At any rate, going back to July 26, 1990 (you know, back before the Persian Gulf War dominated the headlines), it’s time to look back on this date in history.  It looks like Marion Barry’s trial about cocaine conspiracy and perjery dominated the headlines on this date, and rightfully so.  That is about all I can find on this date.  Makes you miss the war time news! 

Welcome to Maryland Bennett Fulper, we are glad to have you and we wish you the best of luck.

Extra Droppings:

First of all Happy 4th of July, or Independence Day.  We celebrated Independence Day yesterday by freeing a black snake that got caught in some old bird netting we had in our shed.  The thing was extremely tangled.  We held it down and cut around it as best as we could and eventually got it free enough so that it could move.  It still has some netting on it (I’m guessing) but is now able to move around.  Once we got it’s head free, we kind of had to suspend rescue operations.  Afterall, he’s a wild animal and doesn’t know we are trying to help him.  Also I must point out, my wife did a majority of the work on this one.  I held the thing down as best I could from 6 feet away.  Very interesting day to say the least!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 8:50 am and is filed under Maryland Terps Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.