'Here is our Renaissance man'

q&a graham spicer, wilde lake, football

What do your parents do?

My dad is a professor at Johns Hopkins and my mom works at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. My brother Calum is going to Johns Hopkins.

Does all that mean you have your heart set on going to Johns Hopkins?

No. I would kind of like to get away from Johns Hopkins.

Do you have other interests beyond football and schoolwork?

Yes. I play rec league soccer, and the school has an Ultimate Frisbee club team that I play on. I play trumpet in band, and I also play bagpipes.

What is Ultimate Frisbee, and how did you get interested in bagpipes?

Ultimate Frisbee is played on a field, not unlike a football field, and you try to shuttle the Frisbee down the field by passing it to your teammates. When it's dropped, you lose possession. It takes speed and coordination.

My mom, she was born in Scotland. She has played bagpipes since she was a teenager, and she got me started when I was 8 years old. It's difficult to play a trumpet, but it's 10 times easier than playing bagpipes. It's so much more complicated. And when I started as a kid, my hands were small and that made it more difficult, because you have to be able to squeeze the bag. But I did it. When I got bigger, it became infinitely easier.

I used to play in a band, a bagpipe band with five to 20 other bagpipers and people with drums. We'd play marches and different tunes. We'd enter contests in which you're judged on the interpretation of the music, and the marching is important. The marching ties in to the synchronization. You can get burned out on it when you're in competition. Ten hours of bagpipes - by the end of the day a bagpipe is the last thing you want to hear. But some of the songs are melodic and beautiful."