Saine quickly turning heads
The Piqua High football and track star wowed coaches as early as the seventh grade.
By Kyle Nagel
Staff Writer
PIQUA — Five years ago, Ron Pearson lined up his seventh-grade football players to find the fastest of the bunch.
As Piqua High School's track coach, Pearson knew what to watch. Then he saw a running back come screaming across the field fast enough to make him say, "Wow, I like this kid."
Brandon Saine was that impressive.
"He was as fast as anyone I had at the high school level, and he's in seventh grade," Pearson said. "And Piqua had not been known for flat-out fast people. He snuck up on me."
Saine won't be sneaking up on many people again. In the five years since that practice, he has become one of the premier running backs and sprinters his age in the country.
Entering his senior year, the Piqua native has already verbally committed to play football for Ohio State and boasts back-to-back state championships in the 100 and 400 meters.
For all of his athletic accomplishments — his rare combination of bulk and velocity — Saine remains most unique when compared to his peers off the field.
Saine was born on a Wednesday, two months premature, with a reddish tint, a fuzzy exterior and electrodes monitoring brain activity attached to the head of his 4-pound body.
Wendi Croft, Saine's mother, had been in Piqua Memorial Medical Center for three days and expected to remain until the birth of her child in February. But on the afternoon of Dec. 14, 1988, her mother noticed she was having contractions.
They were back contractions, and Croft decided they were simply aches.
"I've often said," Croft joked, "that he was a pain in my back from the beginning."
Doctors rushed Croft, who was 19, into the delivery room. As soon as possible, they attached the suction-cup-looking tools that have left a permanent bald spot on the top of Saine's head. New barbers always think they've nicked him.
In his first year of life, Saine once stopped breathing in his mother's arms, developed a severe case of asthma, had heart and apnea monitors at home, and underwent two hernia operations. It was an uncomfortable first 12 months.
"He was such a bitty little thing," said Debbie Chaney, Saine's grandmother.
No longer. Both in size and spectacle, Saine has grown from that premature infant into one of the most unique high school athletes this area has known. With his combination of bulk (6-foot, 215 pounds) and speed (state-record holder in the 100 meters), the Piqua High School star has committed to play football at Ohio State and competed nationally as a sprinter.
Although his name is on the lips of Buckeye fans and track enthusiasts alike, Saine remains an unusual celebrity. While people stop to admire him in Hallmark, he is still uncomfortable with new faces. He's quiet, yet polite. Silly, yet determined.
A student who always loved going to school for math, he takes advanced classes. He never swears. And whenever he finishes telephone conversations with his 15-year-old sister, he always says, "I love you."
The same 17-year-old who garbs his husky, Shae, in shorts and a T-shirt for fun frightens opponents on the track and the football field.
"He's a bit of an enigma," said Larry Hamilton, a retired Piqua teacher who has lived in the area for 35 years. "He's a warm person, but he's reserved and cautious at the same time."
Trying childhood
Croft met Anthony Saine at the Salem Mall the December after she graduated from Piqua High School. She was 18; he was 24.
Five months later, she was pregnant, and she left Edison State Community College for the baby's sake. She lived with her mother, Chaney, and didn't work for Saine's first 18 months because of his health problems.
At home, Croft and Chaney worked to make things happy. And manly. Saine's first word was "ball." There's a photo stashed somewhere of Saine, his foot on a fallen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle doll and boxing gloves on his hands, his arm raised in victory.
Sister Brianna came two years later. Saine didn't like her at first. He showed it with homemade haircuts.
Soon he became used to women in the house, living often with his grandmother, mother and, starting when he was 9, two sisters. He remains the only person who can make the youngest, 8-year-old Braygen, tell the truth.
But Saine and Croft describe time living with Anthony Saine as difficult. Brandon Saine said his father is a big reason why he's so quiet and shy around people, although that's improving.
"When I was growing up, my dad ... I was scared of him," Saine said. "I wasn't allowed to talk to girls outside of the house and everything, and they weren't allowed to come over. He was very strict, and I was afraid to talk to people or I would get in trouble."
Mother and son say Anthony Saine was an intimidating presence who often was physically present without being emotionally connected. Attempts to reach Anthony Saine were unsuccessful.
"You couldn't be yourself is the best way to say it," Croft said. "Brandon's silly, goofy. But he couldn't do stuff like that around his dad. He would just say, 'Stop doing that.' Picking at him. His dad's whole attitude, it wasn't really a verbal thing, but he was very, very negative."
When Brandon Saine was in eighth grade, Croft decided to get the family away from Anthony Saine for good. A brief, unhappy move to Kentucky began a period when Croft found steady work at Crane Pumps and Systems, love in fiancé Ryan Turner and her own home for the family.
Brandon Saine has been a stabilizing force throughout the process.
"He really influences me, in the way he acts and how he lives his life," said Turner, "instead of the other way around."
Highlight reel
Bill Nees, Piqua's football coach, propped his feet on the table in front of him and held the control in his hand. In this meeting room inside Alexander Stadium, things were cluttered. The early August organizing period before the season made the innards a bit more cramped, but the focus was on one television as Saine's highlight tape played.
The clips came from his junior season, when he gained 1,834 all-purpose yards (including 1,308 yards rushing) and was named the Greater Western Ohio Conference's offensive player of the year. Nees had already watched a 75-yard run with a huge burst of speed, a backtracking kickoff coverage tackle, a shifty punt return and a 2-yard touchdown run one-on-one against a linebacker.
"I think this is another one that's pretty spectacular," Nees said.
Saine takes the handoff going left, splits two defenders and surges past others down the left sideline. Nees played it again.
"That's one, two guys miss him right, there, three, four, five ... that's making a couple people look a little awkward," he said.
Velvet Revolver's Falling Down began to play on the radio, the fourth song during this impromptu film session.
"Man, I didn't realize it was this long," Nees said.
Saine sprints for a 90-yard touchdown. A guest asks if it was the fourth quarter, because the opposing players — at least on the tape — seem to be running so much slower.
"That's a 9-1 team right there," Nees said. "That's the thing, we have a pretty wicked schedule. The competition level is pretty good."
Not a party guy
Saine and best friend Pete Rolf, a Piqua linebacker, once decided they would try going to one of the parties they heard so much about.
"It was boring," he said. "I just sat there."
That isn't the only way Saine — noted athlete or not — is unlike his peers. First off, it's difficult to enter into this trusted circle. There's the family, Pete, girlfriend Kylie ... and that's about it. He has a nervous laugh he displays frequently.
Despite his quiet exterior, Saine has his playful side. He goofs around doing the morning announcements at school. He played the jokester to Rolf's straight man on the Spanish class video in which they were selling candy.
For Christmas, Saine puts on his gift clothes immediately, hamming for the family. And then there are those famous music videos, the ones where he and Rolf dance to techno. They have the glow sticks, but the dance moves can be suspect.
His reserved side remains. Barb Davis could see that within minutes of starting her first session in Advanced Placement Government last year. As the teacher with eight students, Davis organized her class as discussion-oriented, Saine's weak point.
Just as he has socially, Saine eventually opened up. They talked about school and track. But he never talked about the results. Only his excitement about the new T-shirts from each meet.
Never mind that he was, you know, setting event records.
Like many people, Davis roots so hard for Saine that she made it out to a football game last fall to watch him play. The next week in school, he showered her in appreciation.
"You'd think I was there to watch the kid on the end of the bench who never got in," Davis said.
Sprinting star
One day, when Saine started playing organized football in the fifth grade, the coaches held races to determine their fastest players. If you won, you stayed. Pretty soon, Saine was the only player left, so the coaches raced him.
He beat all the coaches.
By eighth grade, the kid that had been called "Flash" in youth baseball was talked into joining the track team by Ron Pearson, Piqua's high school coach who helped with junior high school.
"At junior high track meets, he would cross the finish line, then turn and start back to collect his stuff before other guys finished the race," said David Palmer, Piqua's athletic director. "He was really that fast."
As a nod to his speed and power, Ohio State was the first to offer him a football scholarship. Although a big Michigan fan — he always chose the video game Wolverines against Rolf — he told coach Jim Tressel in May that he would run for the Buckeyes beginning in 2007.
That came after a track season in which he set a state record in the 100 meters (10.38 seconds) and defended championships in the 100 and 400 meters. There are plenty licking their lips for a Saine-Ted Ginn Jr. footrace.
And with a year of high school remaining, Saine has the chance to solidify his place as one of the great scholastic names in Miami Valley history. In a school known for its music program and its show choir, Saine remains one of the best performers — and, teachers and parents say, all-around best people — that the city has seen.
"Brandon's the type of kid that comes around once in a career," Palmer said. "I don't want to say once in a lifetime. At least, I hope not."
