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[Jeff Cunningham]

Bayside quarterback to take snaps at Florida State
By Jeff Cunningham | jcunningham@hrvarsity.com

VIRGINIA BEACH -- Erik Manuel Sr. smiled when a reporter asked him a question Wednesday evening in the gym at Bayside High School.

"Thank you for the question," he told the reporter. "But this is my son's day. I'm just sitting back and enjoying it."

Erik's son, E.J. Manuel, announced that he will play college football for Florida State beginning in the 2008 season. The 6-foot-5, 205-pound rising senior had over 30 offers to be a college quarterback, eventualy narrowing his search to 11 schools: Florida State, Miami, LSU, Maryland, Penn State, Rutgers, Tennessee, Alabama, Oregon, North Carolina and Boston College.

E.J. -- or Erik Jr. -- visited the Tallahassee campus last weekend and said one thing stood out to him more than anything else.

"I'm down there visiting the campus and people are coming up to me telling me, 'Hey, we hope you come play for us,'" he said. "There was a comfortability with Florida State I didn't find anywhere else.

"It felt like home. It reminded me of Virginia Beach."

E.J. comes into his senior season as one of the nation's most sought-after prospects. He's a perennial top-15 player nationally, and some scouting web sites have him as high as the No. 2 high school player in the country. He's described as a solid pro-style quarterback, though Bayside coach Darnell Moore said it goes a little further than that.

"Florida State's getting a polished kid," he said of Manuel. "E.J.'s a real student of the game and he's a fierce competitor. The coaches down there will probably love him because they won't have to show him where to set his feet before he throws or anything like that, because he's already got all that down."

E.J. will also take part this summer in Elite 11, a national camp for high school quarterbacks held in California.

For E.J., part of the decision came down to timing. With his team eyeing a possible Group AAA state title this year, he didn't want the spector of a college announcement to cloud him or his team's season.

So he announced his choice before the season even started.

"I want to do nothing this season but concentrate on my teammates and on the team and on my schoolwork," E.J. said. "I don't want anything distracting from that, so it was real improtant for me to make this decision now."

Though Moore said the decision to announce his college before the season was E.J.'s alone, he did admit to being relieved.

"That's a lot of pressure for a kid his age," Moore said. "Over 30 offers hanging over his head, I don't know of any way a kid can let that drag on through February ... that's just too much pressure on the kid."

But given the smile on E.J.'s face as he smiled for the cameras in his Florida State ballcap surrounded by Erik and his mother Jackie, the pressure was likely off his shoulders.

"It was a very long, very hard process," he said. "But I'm happy with the decision I made."