In Deltona, Fla., Trinity Christian Academy’s athletic department was a trailer left behind from freeway construction nearby. The football practice field was at a park, a bus ride from the school. The Eagles played against other small schools, running the wing-T offense, with two running backs, a wingback and a tight end. Quarterback Paxton Lynch took direct snaps, but even that could trigger amused smiles, because he was nearly a foot taller than his center and his other gritty, yet short and stocky offensive linemen. If he had a busy passing game, Lynch threw maybe 10 times.

As Lynch approached his senior year, word got around that this tall kid at the little school had a big arm, that a transfer to a higher-classification school might be win-win for the quarterback who had drawn only mild college recruiting interest to that point and for any opportunistic coach and program in the talent-rich Orlando area.

Allen “BJ” Johnson was Trinity’s coach then, and Lynch had been in his program since the sixth grade.

“Coming into his senior year, we had five, six other big high schools calling him, trying to convince him to leave, saying: ‘Hey, you’re not going to get recruited from there. Come play with us,’ ” Johnson recalled Friday. “I had heard the rumors that this school said Paxton was coming there, that school said Paxton was coming there. He could have gone to other schools and thrown the ball. So we talked about it and he said: ‘Coach, this is my team. I don’t want to go to anybody else’s team. I can’t leave my brothers like that.’ And he didn’t.”

Friday, as he wore a suit, an unshakable smile and a Broncos hat and made the rounds at his new team’s headquarters, Lynch reacted decisively when asked about why he stayed at Trinity Christian.

“Just because of my loyalty to Coach BJ,” Lynch said. “I’m real big on trusting in people and people trusting in me, and I had that loyalty with my coaches and my teammates. I couldn’t leave Coach BJ no matter what, and I trusted in God’s plan that it was going to work out for the best. It did.”

Thursday night, Lynch became the Broncos’ heir apparent quarterback — whether that means this year or in the near future — when Denver worked a trade with Seattle, moved up from 31st to 26th in the first round and eagerly claimed the University of Memphis product. Here was Broncos general manager John Elway, who had the ability to keep plays alive with athletic maneuverability until he could take advantage of his peerless arm strength, talking about a quarterback able to keep plays alive with athletic maneuverability. Then the next day, when Elway and Broncos coach Gary Kubiak flanked Lynch for the ceremonial photos with the new Broncos jersey, what was most striking was that Lynch towered over the coach and GM, both former Denver quarterbacks.

It has been an unlikely odyssey for Lynch, who five years ago was an unheralded high school quarterback in a small-school program, running an offense that seemed to lengthen the already long odds of him attracting major-college offers.

“The wing-T had nothing to do with him. It was just that we didn’t have the athletes around him to be successful doing it that way,” Johnson said. “We had a gang of running backs, though. … His senior year, we actually were going to go to the spread because we couldn’t hold him off anymore. He had gotten that good.”

But Lynch suffered a deep knee bruise and missed the first five games. Because Lynch’s backup was a 5-foot-4 freshman, Johnson scrapped the spread and went back to the wing-T, and stuck with it when Lynch returned rather than go through the disruption of an offensive overhaul during the season. That meant Lynch again threw the ball sparingly in the stretch run, leaving college coaches to wonder about his talent.

“It was cool because I got to run the ball a lot, but I was frustrated because I didn’t get to throw it so much,” Lynch said, smiling. “Coach BJ always jokes to me saying: ‘I did you a favor. You have so many throws left in your arm because we never threw the ball in high school.’ So I thank him for that.”

Said Johnson: “I was so frustrated about him not getting attention, but he wasn’t. He was, ‘Coach, listen, if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. I’m going to be OK.’ We had Florida State, Florida, Miami, North Carolina, Duke, all these people came and saw him, and everyone admitted: ‘Man, he’s a good quarterback. He has a heck of an arm.’

Not “scared a bit”

“But they were wondering: ‘Why is he here? Why is he at Trinity? Is he scared to go somewhere else?’ They couldn’t understand why in this day and age, with jumping schools and ‘Me, me, me, me,’ he was still there. In their mind, he had to be scared. He wasn’t scared a bit, but he grew a bond with those guys he grew up with.”

Deltona is a not a gated suburb; it’s a hardworking city of about 86,000 between Orlando and Daytona Beach. David Lynch, Paxton’s father, is a salesman. His mother, Stacie, works in the Winn-Dixie grocery bakery.

“She does it all,” Paxton said. “She makes birthday cakes, brings home stuff for us all the time … which is good.”

When he got word that the Broncos had drafted him, Lynch was at an Orange City, Fla., bowling alley his camp had rented for the night. Not a hotel ballroom, not a ritzy restaurant, not a country club. A bowling alley, where he could celebrate being drafted by trying to pick up the 7-10 split.

“I know some people are not very humble and aren’t true to their roots, and then they get humbled,” Lynch said. “It always shocks them, and some people can’t bounce back from it. Growing up where I grew up, real small town, nobody ever had anything unless you worked for it, so that’s how I was always raised. All that hard work I put into this game of football has paid off, but it’s only just begun.”

He was handling it all with poise when he got what might have been his big break.

One of the quarterbacks selected for Central Florida’s all-classification East-West all-star game suffered a broken collarbone. One team’s coach was Warner Christian Academy’s Andy Price, who had gone against Lynch when he a sophomore and junior, and he took a call from the game’s organizer.

“I was at a Cracker Barrel (restaurant) because I was scouting a third-round opponent for us,” Price recalled Friday. “He listed several (possible replacements), including Paxton. … I knew Coach Johnson real well, we’re still friends, and I knew Paxton from watching him play and knew he had caught some tough breaks with injuries and whatnot. I thought, ‘Heck, yes, I want to see what he can do with maybe some players around him and healthy.’ “

With the big-school kids, Lynch was the game’s MVP.

“I was the only guy who didn’t have an offer, so I was competing like it was a championship game,” Lynch said. “When I got in the game, it all showed that I prepared to give myself an opportunity to get noticed by those coaches.”

Price was astounded when the other quarterback on his team, Cincinnati-bound Trenton Norvell, asked the coach to stop alternating him with Lynch. Why? Norvell had his college offer, Lynch didn’t, and Norvell was OK with leaving Lynch auditioning the rest of the game.

Suddenly, major programs were at least checking in, deciding if there might be a scholarship available for Lynch if others changed their minds. As the signing date approached, Lynch said he would attend Memphis, where the new coaching staff headed by Justin Fuente was scrambling to fill its first class.

On the morning of the signing date, George O’Leary’s staff at nearby Central Florida got the word that a quarterback prospect was switching to Auburn. Charlie Taaffe, then UCF’s offensive coordinator, Friday recalled that O’Leary asked him, “What’s your Plan B?”

“I said we really liked Paxton Lynch, that he just had a good all-star game, and I told him about his size and all that,” Taaffe said. “But he had committed to Memphis, and he stuck by his commitment. It would have been easier for him and his family to go with UCF, and I think that says something about the kid.”

Lynch would be staying home, in effect. It was tempting. Briefly.

“It goes back to the loyalty thing,” Lynch said. “I committed to Coach Fuente. He trusted in me. They were the first team to believe in me, that I could do it. Obviously, I believed in myself, but going away from home was scary for me, so I was kind of debating.”

He stuck with Memphis.

“I was obviously appreciative of it, I’ll tell you that much,” Fuente, who recently moved to Virginia Tech to replace the retiring Frank Beamer, said Friday. “I think it says something about the way he was raised and his core values. They did a fantastic job, his mom and dad, of raising him, a humble, hardworking young man who tries to do everything he says he’s going to do.”

Snap misconception

After a redshirt season in 2012, Lynch took over as the Tigers’ starter in 2013. Not far removed from running the wing-T against small-school competition, he threw for 233 yards per game in his three seasons and adapted to running the spread. One misconception is that he never took snaps from center. Brad Cornelsen, the Tigers’ offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, Friday noted that especially in Lynch’s first two years in the program, he took direct snaps often and that even the past two years, the Tigers had goal-line and other short-yardage packages that had Lynch under center.

He was adaptive, and that’s an encouraging precedent, given that he will be charged with making the adjustment to the pro game and taking snaps in Kubiak’s offense, most likely watching Mark Sanchez start at the outset and also working with another Orlando-area high school product Trevor Siemian.

“All he did was all we ever asked him to do,” said Cornelsen, who also has moved to Virginia Tech. “He’s a sponge. He is real smart. When we got him, we weren’t sure how raw he was. We knew he didn’t have a lot of experience, but he’s a guy that can process everything. … There wasn’t any style of play we felt like he couldn’t physically or mentally do. The last couple of years, we were up-tempo, no-huddle, but for two years (including his redshirt year), he was huddling up and calling plays and getting under center.”

Cornelsen added: “The thing that makes him unique is his size, coupled with his quickness and athleticism. His ability to get the ball from under center and get away and move his feet and however he needs to get out of the gate. It was never awkward for him. … Look, he knows there’s going to be a lot to learn in the pro game. I know there’s always a lot of talk about guys that come from the no-huddle and the spread and all that. But calling a play in the huddle and getting the snap from center, I don’t know that that’s really what is going to be a big deal for him. It’s going to be the details of coverages and checking plays and checking runs and just the speed of the game. Those are the things that will be the biggest challenges in the step to the next level.”

Taaffe, retired from coaching, in the past few months schooled Lynch while working as a tutor for QB Country, a private firm.

“He’s got the best deep-ball touch I’ve seen,” Taaffe said. “He’s got tremendous arm strength, but he’s also got a great touch on his deep-ball throws. Those are the things he wanted to emphasize on his pro day so that’s how we geared the script and I don’t think he left much doubt about those things — his ability to extend plays with his feet to get on the perimeter. I know Denver does a lot of play-action, naked boots and those types of things, and I think he’ll thrive in those things.”

Lynch’s high school coach, Johnson, left Trinity Christian and now is the head coach at Deltona High. He jokes that maybe the Broncos should thank him for preserving Lynch’s arm.

“I got him early in my career,” Johnson said, laughing. “If I would have had him later, I probably would have thrown his arm out. As a young coach, I was so bullheaded, ‘Type A,’ saying the wing-T gives us the best opportunity to win. Not taking any chances. Defense wins. I know now you have to let athletes go out there and be athletes.”

Now it’s up to the Broncos to decide how to use Lynch.

And how soon.

Terry Frei: tfrei@denverpost.com or @TFrei