HS Football: Minersville’s Dante Carr commits to play football at UCF

Minersville's Dante Carr runs for a touchdown (Photo by Kelly Wiley).

MINERSVILLE — Scott Frost knows how to develop quarterbacks.

His next protege will be Minersville standout Dante Carr.

The Miners’ four-sport star officially announced the next step of his athletic journey late Tuesday night when he committed to play NCAA Division I college football at the University of Central Florida on his X account.

The 6-foot-4, 225-pound quarterback chose the Knights after making an official visit with his family to the Orlando, Florida, university last weekend.

The opportunity to play for Frost was a deciding factor in Carr’s decision to choose UCF among 11 Division I offers. Frost, who won a national championship as a player at Nebraska in 1997, was re-hired as the UCF head coach in December 2024 after serving as the offensive coordinator at Oregon (2013-15), head coach at UCF (2016-17) and Nebraska (2018-22), and as a senior analyst with the Los Angeles Rams (2024).

Along the way he’s mentored stars such as Marcus Mariota, Justin Herbert and current UCF QB coach McKenzie Milton, who guided the Knights to an undefeated 13-0 mark in 2017.

“The main thing that stood out to me about him was how he develops quarterbacks,” Carr said of his future head coach. “He takes low-rated recruited quarterbacks and turns them into Heisman finalists. Just the way he develops quarterbacks … how he sees things in quarterbacks.

“When he reached out to me and started saying that stuff to me, I knew he meant it. He’s definitely a quarterback guy. Just having that as a coach was a real big reason I ended up committing there.”

The 17-year-old Carr received 11 Division I offers to date: FCS schools Lehigh, Cornell, Penn, Youngstown State, Georgetown and Towson; FBS schools Coastal Carolina, Army, Old Dominion, Rutgers and UCF.

Several other schools — Penn State, James Madison, Wake Forest, Temple, Boston College and Syracuse, to name a few — either had Carr on their campus or visited Minersville Area High School to meet with him.

The key for Carr was the opportunity to play quarterback and a coach like Frost, a “quarterback whisperer” who will bring out the best of him at that position. UCF was the first of the five FBS schools to offer Carr as a quarterback.

“He loves my competitiveness,” Carr said of Frost. “He doesn’t care what other coaches think, how many stars I have. He does his own evaluation, which I really liked. He said he wasn’t going to miss out on another Josh Allen, how he wasn’t getting recruited.

“He told he didn’t care what I ranked, didn’t care the stars and that’s why he ended up offering me.”

The son of Matt and Katie Carr of Minersville, Dante and his family arrived May 29 in Orlando for the official visit. They spent Friday having breakfast with the coaching staff, touring the UCF campus and football facilities and spending time with the other recruits.

UCF matched up the recruits with current players on the team, and Carr spent Saturday with current Knights QB Jacurri Brown. Sunday, Carr and his family were treated to a day at Universal Studios. Frost personally extended an offer to Carr in his hotel room at some point during the weekend.

Carr said the time he spent with Brown, and what the junior from Valdosta, Georgia, said about Frost and his staff being teachers above all else, was the most influential part of the trip.

“What kind of hooked me was that all the coaches are teachers,” Carr said. “They’re not going to sit there and scream in your face, but they’re going to really coach you and teach you.

“Hearing that from a player … you hear that from coaches all the time. But hearing it come from a player meant something more.”

Carr broke onto the local sports scene as a junior high basketball player, with videos of him dunking during games going viral. He made an immediate impact at the high school level as a freshman, excelling in football, basketball, baseball and track the past three years.

The Miners’ starting QB since he was a freshman, Carr has thrown for more than 1,000 yards in each of his three varsity seasons.

This past fall, the dual-threat QB completed 98-of-180 passes for 1,757 yards and 22 touchdowns while rushing 90 times for 1,182 yards and 23 touchdowns as the Miners went 7-4 and lost to Executive Education in the District 11 Class AA semifinals.

As a sophomore, Carr threw for 1,139 yards and 14 TDs while rushing for 640 yards and 10 scores in leading Minersville to a 10-3 record and the District 11 Class A crown, the Miners’ first District 11 title in 20 years.

Carr was selected to the Pennsylvania Football Writers’ Class AA All-State team as a junior and was a second-team PAFootballNews.com Coaches Select pick as a punter as a sophomore.

For his career, Carr has thrown for 4,069 yards and a school-record 50 touchdowns while rushing for 2,139 yards and 38 TDs. He’s also a 1,000-point scorer in basketball and a two-time PIAA state qualifier in track and field.

“He’s a one-of-a-kind kid. We’ve known it since he was young with his athletic ability, the things he does and his hard work,” Minersville head coach Justin Frantz said. “You can’t teach size like he has. His athletic ability, it’s something he’s worked forever, getting bigger, stronger and faster. It sets him apart.

“When you’re a Division I kid, you know it. Everybody has been saying that for a few years now. We knew it, but it’s nice to see that everybody around the country now knows.”

Carr and Frantz said UCF was a late entrant into the recruiting process, with Milton changing his travel plans to make a special visit to Minersville to see Carr in mid-May.

Carr said that after his official visit to UCF that he knew Central Florida was “home.” He canceled a planned official visit to Rutgers this weekend and is happy to have decided on a college so he can spend the summer focusing on the upcoming season.

“After every visit I go home and I pray about it,” Carr said. “Everyone always tells me, ‘You’ll know where home is when you know.’ After that visit I knew that’s where I wanted to be.

“I wanted to commit now so now I can totally focus on going out and winning a district championship one last time with my team.”

Carr said he will graduate early from Minersville and enroll at Central Florida in January. All four of the quarterbacks on UCF’s roster entering the 2025 season are either juniors or seniors.

UCF, which competes in the 16-team Big 12 Conference, went 4-8 last season.

“It’s a huge advantage,” Carr said of enrolling early. “That’s one more winter, one more spring you get to learn the playbook, get stronger, get faster and get acclimated to the speed of the game. Going in early, you have seven months to get acclimated. The main thing is catching up to the speed of college football.”

Carr gave a lot of credit to his parents and the time they’ve sacrificed taking him to camps, clinics and college visits.

He also gave a lot of credit to quarterback coaches Jim Cantafio and Chad Henne of Susquehanna Valley Sports Inc., who have worked with Carr since his freshman season.

Cantafio is a former head coach at Conestoga Valley, Wyoming Valley West and Wilson West Lawn, while Henne was a star at Wilson West Lawn and the University of Michigan before embarking on a 15-year NFL career that featured stops in Miami, Jacksonville and two Super Bowl-winning teams in Kansas City.

“They’ve done so much for me,” Carr said. “If it wasn’t for Coach Cantafio, I would have never got recruited. He sent my film to so many coaches and really jump-started this when I was a freshman.

“Chad is an NFL quarterback. He’s taught me so much, things that not a lot of people know and I never knew about the game. Those two have been a huge part of this process. They’ve meant so much to me. I’m just going to keep going to them and getting better.”