Unfamiliar Names, Undeniable Impact

The first day of preseason practice is always an eye-opener for the freshmen on the Harvard football team. In full pads, in the muggy Massachusetts heat, the rookies get a crash course in college ball. The pace is vastly swifter than in high school. Coaches bark out rapid-fire orders. The drills are complex. The running never stops.

Linebacker Eric Schultz, fresh out of Alpharetta, Ga., remembers wondering what he’d gotten himself into.

“I went over to my friend [freshman defensive end Sonny McCracken] and said ‘I don’t know how I’m gonna handle this,’” Schultz recalls.

“Everyone is physically so much bigger—it’s shocking,” wide receiver Alex Breaux says. “You go from high school, where you’re stronger and faster than everyone, to where you’re the weakest.”

It’s usually enough to send at least a few wide-eyed 18-year-olds packing. But this season, for the first time in recent memory, every freshman who started the preseason was still on the roster come opening kickoff.

“I think it would have been different if one person quit, it might have started a chain of events,” Schultz says. “But we all stuck together.”

It’s a good thing, too. Though this year’s squad had no shortage of veterans despite the graduation of some of its top playmakers from last season, untimely injuries left the Harvard coaches combing the depth charts to plug up the gaps. As a result, the Crimson has had first-year players not only filling in but starting—with marked success.

Cornerback Andrew Berry, though recruited as a quarterback, was called upon to replace injured veteran Gary Sonkur in the season opener against Holy Cross. Since then he has played in all but two contests, starting in five.

Schultz, who has played in eight games this season, has often been joined on the line by classmates Glenn Dorris and Sean Hayes at linebacker, Matt Curtis at defensive tackle, and Brenton Bryant at defensive end.

“We already had a brotherhood going on [from preseason],” Schultz says. “We feed off each other.”

Breaux is second on the team with 428 yards receiving yards on 27 catches. In eight games, he is averaging 53.5 yards per contest.

At the beginning of the season, though, Breaux did not anticipate much playing time—not with three veteran seniors ahead of him.

“The first day in camp, I saw my name on the [wide receiver] depth chart and I’m 16 out of 17,” Breaux says. “As a competitive person it’s like a punch to the stomach. There’s so much work to be done to even get on the travel team.”

Breaux impressed in the preseason intra-squad scrimmage, but he was unlikely to see action aside from multi-receiver sets towards the end of the season.

Unlikely, that is, until the Crimson’s top two receivers—senior Rodney Byrnes and junior Corey Mazza—went down with injuries in the first two games of the season. Tyler missed two games with a shoulder injury as well, thrusting the 6’3 Californian from Phillips Exeter Academy into a starting role.

“It’s unbelievable how Alex has played and really stepped up when we needed him the most,” sophomore quarterback Liam O’Hagan says. “We turned to a freshman when our star Corey Mazza goes down, and he just catches it in stride.”

It wasn’t too long ago that league rules would have barred Breaux and his classmates from participating in a single play. Until