Garrett Nussmeier left it all on the field with his surprise engagement to high school sweetheart Ella Springfield at her family’s lake home in Grand Lake, Oklahoma.

Just two short months before Garrett was set to start as quarterback for the first game of the 2025 LSU football season, he dropped to one knee to ask his high school sweetheart, Ella Springfield, for her hand in marriage.

While she was aware an engagement would be happening sometime soon, she says the time and place came as a complete shock. “We’ve never been able to spend the summer together because he had football workouts and I would be with my family at our lake house,” she says. “The engagement happened around 6 p.m., and I was dropping him off at the airport the next morning at 8 a.m. because he had to get back to workouts. The whole next day, I was like, ‘Did that actually happen?’”

With the lake house in a remote area, it was no easy task to get both Garrett and Ella’s loved ones there for the proposal. But knowing that the vacation home is Ella’s happy place, and that she had requested an engagement far from a football field, Garrett said he was determined to make it happen.

“My lake house was the last place I thought it would happen, and it was the best place it could have happened at,” Ella says. “He knows me so well!”

Ella and Garrett met while in high school in Dallas. At the time, Garrett had recently relocated to Texas after his father got a coaching job with the Dallas Cowboys. “I think about how his dad’s career could have had them living anywhere, but he just so happened to get Dallas,” Ella says. “I’ve always thought that is a crazy part of our story.”

With Dallas being Ella’s hometown, the place they met and, recently, the place where they have moved in together, it only makes sense that it also serves as the location of their wedding, which is tentatively set for early 2027.

“I’m so excited for what’s to come,” Springfield says. “This truly is a mark of a new chapter in both of our lives.”