At HPU home basketball games, Austin Pinelli becomes Captain Purple.
He’s the guy in the purple body suit.
He’ll be underneath the opposing team’s basket, and when one of their players comes up to the foul line for a shot, Pinelli will put down his tuba, have his friends pick him up and hold him horizontally.
Then, he’ll do the backstroke through the pep band.
It’s all to get the player at the foul line to miss. It’s happened at least once. When it did, the pep band roared.
Pinelli is the pep band’s unofficial spirit leader. But he’s more than just a purple swimmer in the stands.
He has been selected as HPU’s Extraordinary Leader for April because of his leadership.
To understand where those qualities come from, look no further than his family’s Christmas tree farm in Dover, Delaware.
That’s the root of who Pinelli is.
A Tom Sawyer Childhood
Pinelli came of age on 22 acres.
At his family’s Evergreen Farms, he has helped plant trees, trim trees and put into the ground fertilizer tubes two inches long. He also has mowed the grounds. It takes him two weeks to finish.
Around Thanksgiving, he’s been a hayride helper. He has assisted people climbing aboard a wagon pulled by a tractor so they can find a tree they like. Then, he’ll talk to them like they’re family and give them advice about finding the right tree.
He’ll do that for a month, right up to Christmas.
Evergreen Farms is Pinelli’s playground. He has played, fished and learned to swim in the farm’s pond. It’s all his oasis of green five minutes north of Delaware’s capital.
“That is my Jerusalem, my Promised Land,” says Pinelli, a junior. “I would be perfectly content to spend my entire life on that farm. Seeing families come at Christmas time, everyone is happy, everyone is having a good time. It’s my
ministry, and I love sharing it with everyone else.”
Pinelli sees music as his ministry, too.
He started taking piano lessons at age 7. He later picked up the violin, cello, guitar, trumpet, xylophone and tuba. He joined the high-stepping marching band of Dover High and became one of the band’s leaders.
He earned first chair in the tuba section by his sophomore year, and before he graduated, he arranged for the entire band songs like Fall Out Boy’s “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light ‘Em Up).”
He did it because his band director, Lenny Knight, showed him how. Knight, a Dover High alumna, had been the band director for 15 years. During that time, he was a surrogate father to many students.
Students like Pinelli.
In March, Knight died of a heart attack. He was 45. Pinelli drove seven hours back home to be with his former band members, his forever friends.
Pinelli did love Knight. Pinelli loves music. He also loves math.
That’s what got him to HPU.
‘God Smiled On Me’
Pinelli is a math whiz. At Dover High, he participated in Delaware’s Secondary School Mathematics League. During his freshman year, he had been ranked No. 1 in his region.
So, when he realized how much he liked math, he looked into what careers involved crunching numbers.
That’s how he found the risk-assessing profession known as actuarial science — and that’s how he found HPU.
He saw HPU’s actuarial science major as one of the best programs on the East Coast. So, he came. And Pinelli blossomed.
He’s a Presidential Scholar, a Millis Scholar and a member of Alpha Lambda Delta, the honor society for first-year students.
He’s also a founding member and treasurer of the Actuarial Science Club. After his sophomore year, he passed Exam P, the first of many tests needed to become a member of the Society of Actuaries.
After a solid week of studying, he passed Exam P on the first try.
Pinelli is also a member of the Board of Stewards, the student-led board that helps organize worship and lead service projects for HPU’s Chapel & Religious Life department.
He, along with HPU students Logan Webb, Rowan Grieb and Manning Franks, formed HPU’s Collision Worship Band. The band now plays almost every chapel service.
During his freshman year, Pinelli earned the HPU Chapel Leadership Award.
“For whatever reason,” Pinelli says, “God smiled on me. I don’t know how I got here, but it’s part of a much bigger plan.”
HPU’s Quest For The Extraordinary
Pinelli plays piano in the Collision Worship Band, leads the pep band’s tuba section and has arranged seven tunes for the HPU pep band.
Pinelli says his creativity has taken off at HPU.
“A lot of my life before High Point was pretty structured,” he says. “It was like, ‘This is how things are, and let’s keep it that way.’ But with High Point, it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s try new things.’ It was something different, and everyone could contribute in a positive way.”
Creativity does move Pinelli. But so does HPU.
Pinelli interviews the incoming Presidential Scholars because he loves to hear their stories about overcoming struggle to find success. Those conversations, Pinelli says, humble him.
“I hear how people worry about my generation being ready with what’s going on around us or running this or that industry,” he says. “But with the friends I’ve made here, I’m reassured we’re not going to mess things up.
“We can make positive change, and it shows me that it’s true what they say about High Point. It does bring in extraordinary students.”