Georgia Tech quarterback Haynes King had just ripped off a key scramble to put his Yellow Jackets in a goal-to-go situation as the team looked to claw its way back into a key game against the Pitt Panthers last November.
On the following play, King once again called his own number and attempted to drive the ball closer to the end zone. But on that first down play, he was caught in the backfield by Panthers #45 Joey Zelinsky, a Cressona native and 2020 graduate of Blue Mountain High School.
Zelinsky wrapped up the quarterback and spun him down for a 2-yard loss. He rose to his feet and gave the hostile crowd at Bobby Dodd Stadium in Atlanta a finger wag. Two plays later, King threw a pick-six interception at the goalline and the Panthers would eventually hang on and knock the Jackets out of contention for a shot at a conference championship.
“As a kid, you always dream of making a big play,” Zelinsky tells Coal Region Canary during a recent conversation. “Everyone was booing me and saying f*** you.”
For Zelinsky, hearing the boos and cursing of tens of thousands of fans rain down on him was a full-circle moment for him.
“This is it,” he thought to himself. “This is all I ever dreamed of. It was a magical moment.”
But he still may not have reached the pinnacle just yet.
“It was really dark times for me.”
Earlier this year, Zelinsky posted on social media that he was declaring himself eligible for the NFL Draft. On Thursday, Zelinsky will begin waiting for his phone to ring as he watches the draft. Though most draft experts don’t believe he’ll actually hear his name called by an NFL team this weekend, he stands a chance at getting an invite to an NFL training camp in the near future.
The idea of that was so far-fetched just a few years ago.
Zelinsky graduated from Blue Mountain High School in 2020. He says he finished last in his class and wasn’t even the star player on his varsity football team.
But he did have talent and a willingness to work hard, according to a former track coach at Blue Mountain.
Harry Myers, who was coaching football at Hamburg Area but track at Blue Mountain, remembers when Zelinsky told him his grade point average and of his dream to play football in college.
Myers told him with his grades, that wasn’t going to happen. He tells Coal Region Canary that he told Zelinsky he’d have to enroll in a prep school – and change his habits as a student – in order to get where he wanted to go.
The coach says Zelinsky told him, “you’re blowing my dream up” but unless he changed his ways, his dream was never going to happen.
Myers says he and Zelinsky developed a good relationship and was able to get through to him.
“You have to focus and learn how to learn,” he remembers telling Zelinsky as he entered his senior year at Blue Mountain.
And Myers says Zelinsky definitely changed.
“That kid dedicated himself,” he says. “He taught himself how to learn. He’s done a 180 and it’s because of him.”
The two also worked on making him a better athlete and changed the way he would play football.
After graduating, he got a job at Home Depot in Saint Clair and he says he wasn’t in a good spot mentally at that time.
“It was tough going,” Zelinsky says, adding that he was extremely depressed. “It was really dark times for me. I kind of lost hope.”
He kept training and began taking boxing lessons with Anthony Kelly in Saint Clair, he says, and thought that might be his future. On his first day with Kelly, Zelinsky says, the trainer broke him down as an athlete.
Recently, he says he just took Kelly out for a steak dinner.
He’s not sure what caused it but Zelinsky says something flipped in his head while he was at Home Depot and he began to change his outlook.
“I have to make something of myself,” he thought to himself. “I knew I needed to turn my life around. I needed to be a highlight.”
And he says he thought about the relationship and advice he had with Myers.
“He was someone I wanted to make proud. He’s the guy that set me straight,” Zelinsky remembers.
To do that, Zelinsky says he reached out to a junior college, Hudson Valley Community College, and there, he’d at least have a have an opportunity to become the highlight he believed somewhere inside that he could be.
He says he showed up to the school’s campus in August 2021 with $600 to his name. It wasn’t long before he was evicted from his apartment and living out of his Jeep Grand Cherokee. Zelinsky says he would recline the front seat down and just go to sleep at night.
Eventually, a friend at school allowed him to stay in his apartment but the situation wasn’t much better. He says it was cold in that apartment. He slept on a mattress on the floor, where he often spent nights with rats crawling on him as he tried to sleep. Rat traps were set around his bed but they didn’t always work.
Zelinsky says he found a way to eat for free with a Wendy’s app promotion. He became about as competitive with that app trying to win free food as he was with excelling on the football field. He says that after a while, employees at that Troy, New York, Wendy’s realized he just needed food.
Things went from bad to worse at that juco. He says he failed a forensics class and “just broke down crying.”
Despite the despair he was feeling in that moment, his time at Hudson Valley actually ended positively. His performance on the field earned him Defensive Player of the Year honors from his team. He began handwriting letters to any school he could. He got a single response back from that effort but it allowed him to move on to Division 1 Eastern Michigan University as a Preferred Walk-on.
But his time at EMU couldn’t start right away so Zelinsky had to come home to Schuylkill County, where he took at job at Wegman’s. Back here, he fell back into that negative mental state, Zelinsky says. He says he continued to work hard and eventually earned a scholarship one semester in at EMU. It was his only option to stay in school there.
His time for the Eagles was productive. Zelinsky says he was never at the top of the depth chart but he was getting in games and making an impact. In his first season, he recorded 11 tackles in 12 games. Eastern Michigan finished the season with a 41-27 victory over San Jose St. in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.
In 2023, he had 1.5 sacks and 37 total tackles. And in his final season there, he tallied another 29 tackles and 2 sacks. But Zelinsky says he wasn’t finished playing and wanted to challenge himself to compete at an even higher level, as he’d done to this point. He applied for a Junior College waiver, got approved, and entered the transfer portal.
Zelinsky says he got numerous offers, mostly from other schools in the same conference as Eastern Michigan, but one opportunity stood out, from the University of Pittsburgh. There, he says, “There was no doubt I was going to play. I fit in perfectly to the scheme. I had a blast.”
For the season, Zelinsky posted good stats, including a 5 tackle game against Notre Dame on Nov. 15. But it was that moment against Georgia Tech the following week that really stood out as the moment he’ll remember most.
“Everything was just clicking,” he says.
Preparing for the NFL Draft
A few years ago, Zelinsky was as about as far away from potentially playing in the NFL as anyone could be. In 2021, he was trying to win games on an app just to eat Wendy’s, sleeping next to rats on a floor, or reclining back in his Jeep.
“I was so broke,” he says, wondering, “Am I even going to make it?”
Last year, his housing and food were taken care of and he collected NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) money at Pitt, one of the most storied college football programs of all time. As he prepares to potentially extend his football career, the kid who finished last in his class at Blue Mountain has an agent.
At the end of the 2025 season, Zelinsky says coaches at Pitt came to him and told him he could play at the next level, so he declared himself eligible for the NFL Draft earlier this year.
As we spoke, Zelinsky says he was preparing to move to southern California to pursue opportunities that opened up for him there. He’s got three degrees, degrees in criminal justice, business, and a Master’s degree in management. But there’s a chance he may be returning to Pennsylvania.
He says the Pittsburgh Steelers have shown an interest in him and could give him a chance to make the team.
“It’s crazy. Now, it’s real. My agents tell me the Rooneys (who own the Steelers) like me. They like my film. It’s just real now. It’s all paying off,” he says. “It’s hard to put into words. You came from nothing and here we are.”
Zelinsky’s chances of getting drafted this weekend may be low but that interest shown in him to this point could get him signed as an undrafted free agent in the near future.
“If someone takes a chance on me, they won’t regret it. I elevate and I adapt,” he says.
Myers agrees. He says, “I think if they give him a chance, he can make it.”
Right now, Zelinsky says he’s not trying to look too far ahead. That’s the approach that’s gotten him to this point in his life.
“I focus on being the best football player and hardest worker I can in the next 24 hours. Don’t worry about the big picture,” he says.
If there is a big picture here, Zelinsky says it’s his family. They’ve been the main motivating factor in his life and he continues to work hard to make them smile when they think of him.
“I get emotional about it. It’s honestly surreal,” he says.
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