On Saturday April 2nd, Dominion’s most highly recruited athlete, Tommy Christ, made his verbal commitment to play football for the University of Virginia.

With 25 different scholarship offers from schools around the country (including Rutgers, Maryland, and West Virginia), Christ certainly had his options but when it came down to it, he wanted to be a Cavalier.  “I really like the coaches there and the school is great. It just seems like a great all-around environment,” said Christ.

After parting ways with their former head coach Mike London, UVA hired former BYU head coach Bronco Mendenhall as their head football coach in December. Mendenhall found success at BYU, going 9-4 last season and started his new job with a bang, signing three star defensive tackle Tommy Christ as his first high school commit at UVA.

With his commitment, Tommy will be joining the Christ family tradition of playing Division I football alongside with his two brothers and his father. His brothers Mike and Matt Christ both are former Dominion football players who play for Monmouth and Virginia Tech respectively while Tommy’s father, Mike, played football for Navy.

Head football coach at Dominion, Karl Buckwalter has coached all three Christ brothers and often refers to them as his German Shepherds for their toughness, dependability and loyalty.

Buckwalter has successfully gotten all three to go to college for football. In describing how this helped Tommy’s recruitment process, Buckwalter said, “Having both of his brothers playing Division I football certainly helps with recruiting, but Tommy has the size, speed and academics to make it on his own.”

Buckwalter was confident that Christ made the right choice for himself. “I think he made the right decision. He had 25 other opportunities and he did his research and decided that he just felt comfortable at UVA, being close to home and playing big time football.”

With so much experience in the family, Christ was surrounded by advice in his commitment process. “My parents talked with me throughout the entire process about what I wanted in a school. My brothers were also giving me pointers throughout the whole process,” Christ said.

Although Christ is a two-way player at Dominion, he will just be playing defensive tackle at Virginia. When asked why he wanted to play DT, Christ spoke like a true defensive lineman when he simply put it, “You can get more aggressive and have the most fun.”

Christ may already know where he is going to college but thankfully for Dominion, he is still a junior and still has another whole season to play for the Titans.