Spartanburg coach Freddie Brown said the Maryland coaches first came to see Grommer last fall in game action. Terps linebackers coach Al Seamonson came back to Spartanburg for spring practice and offered Grommer shortly thereafter. A former assistant coach at Wofford College, Brown already had some familiarity with the Maryland program, which he relayed to Grommer.

“We played up there in 2001 [against] E.J. Henderson and those cats,” Brown said. “I remember the campus being beautiful and having a great atmosphere. I thought about some of those things, and Coach [Ralph] Friedgen being there a long time with a staff that’s been there a long time. I’ve known Al Seamonson for a long time. So we kind of talked about the fact that it’s a beautiful place with great academics and great football. We’ll get a chance to see him a couple times a year playing ACC schools around here. He’ll come down to Tobacco Road. He kind of wanted to get out of town a little bit.”

Grommer joined the Spartanburg football program as a freshman. ‘A real big kid,’ Brown recalled, Grommer was dominant on the ninth-grade team and made a seamless transition to varsity starter as a sophomore. Also a standout at discus and shotput on the track team, Grommer has always impressed Brown with his versatility on the line and overall aptitude for the game’s nuances.

“He’s very good in pass protection and he’s a very good run blocker. We do both,” Brown said. “We play in the spread, so we do spread-type runs and we’ll do … the five-step, seven-step drops. So he has to protect. He plays against pretty good competition. He can do it all. He’s very quick to pick up what you teach him because he’s very bright and he loves the weight room. He’s a great, great student.”

Grommer showed off that intelligence during this recent visit to College Park, spending time in the film room with Terps offensive line coach Tom Brattan. Grommer had already appreciated Brattan’s “old school” approach to coaching. Breaking down game tape only added to the positive thoughts he felt toward his future position coach.

“It got pretty in-depth,” Grommer said. “I got to watch film for like 15 minutes when I was there with Coach Brattan. He showed me all the zone steps, the inside and outside zones. So we just kind of scraped the surface. … It was back and forth. He would ask me, ‘OK, is this a zone step?’ [Then I would say], ‘In high school, we do a little something different. This is what we do.’ It was educational.”

Grommer, who plans to major in business management, said he had wanted to make his commitment before the start of Spartanburg’s season, but he’s glad he took the extra time to explore all his options.

“It’s great,” Grommer said. “All my friends have been saying, ‘Call me a turtle.’ But everyone’s really excited about it, to go DI. They were happy that I made [the commitment] and I was happy to make it.”