Building His Own Tradition: Sam Carney

12/9/2014 9:48:00 AM

The following article is republished with permission from The Valley News of White River Jct., Vt. and profiles Ithaca College football captain Sam Carney about what made Ithaca College the right choice for him in an academic and athletic setting.

By Greg Fennell
Valley News Staff Writer
(Published in print: Sunday, October 26, 2014)

ITHACA, N.Y. — Sam Carney doesn't have Touchdown Jesus. Instead, he has a gorgeous view.

Tradition takes all forms in collegiate athletics. Some of it is for the good. Some brings honor; ask the person dotting the "i" for the Ohio State marching band's script "Ohio." Some grows from habit; consider the people filling the tents on the Krzyzewskiville lawn in hopes of snagging a Duke basketball ticket.

Carney doesn't have 80,000 onlookers to enthusiastically greet him when his Ithaca College football team takes the field on a sunny Saturday afternoon. At $4 to get in, catching the Bombers on their hillside Butterfield Stadium home neither bankrupts nor requires a lengthy wait for admittance, no matter how loyal the IC faithful may be.

The Hanover High School graduate does have examples, however. A brother spent four years with the ghosts at Notre Dame. A sister competed in small-college women's basketball. He has followed their lead and now has his own traditions to respect.

Ithaca College football counts itself among the most consistently successful NCAA Division III programs around. A senior, Carney has become a significant part of it. He was voted the Bombers' defensive captain last spring, and his fall began with All-American notice for his skills as a kick return specialist.

The youngest of the Carneys — now 10 years ensconced as a family in Hanover — has become enveloped in his own athletic tradition: At a small school overlooking a picturesque lake, in a program with a long history of winning, in a city with an Ivy League presence.

"I knew it was good football, with some good players," Carney said during a recent chat in the Ithaca College football office. "With my brother, being around the D-I things, I guess I had a little bit of a big head coming in thinking, 'It's D-III football, blah blah blah.'

"It really has been awesome and the right level for me. This is really, really good football."

You Get What You Seek

The three of the four Carney children who went on to intercollegiate sports programs all sought the same things: a sense of comfort in the location and a feeling that they would, in time, enjoy success and contribute to that success.

Jake Carney found it at South Bend. Gina Hemenway, one of the two girls in the family, played four years of basketball at Ohio's Wittenberg University, a small D-III school west of Columbus. Both see Ithaca as a perfect fit for their younger brother.

"The most exciting thing to watch is that he's really found a place on that team and the boys are really a family up there," said Hemenway, a 2007 Wittenberg graduate now working in Cincinnati. "That resembles what my experience was like as well. To this day, me and my teammates get together for trips and stuff. It goes far beyond the football field, those relationships you build."

"It's great to see, from my perspective, the closeness he's had with his teammates," said Jake Carney, a four-year safety and special-teams player at Notre Dame, now a financial investor in New York. "I had the same closeness he has with his teammates. … It's great to see the way those guys jell and work together.

"All of his roommates are football guys. The traditions of that are very reminiscent of what I experienced at Notre Dame. I'm excited he was able to find a way and experience the way it was for me in college."

The youngest Carney built a good resume at Hanover: Close to 4,200 passing yards in four years, 37 touchdown passes, three postseason appearances. He still had to convince Ithaca football coach Mike Welch to take him on as much as the program might have wanted his presence.

"High school went pretty well, so I was thinking I could make an impact right away," Carney recalled. "Then you come and there's a lot of athletes here, a lot of good players. You kind of learn your spot. It definitely took me a full year to adjust to the speed of the game. Schematically, things here, compared to high school football, it's a whole 'nother animal."

Progress came slowly. Carney spent his freshman year on the junior varsity — or "newcomer" team, as the college calls it — before Welch informed him of the likely need for a kick returner in the future. Carney dedicated himself to improving those skills and was the Bombers' primary returner the past two autumns.

The results of 2013 netted notice in 2014: The website D3football.com selected Carney as a second-team preseason all-American as a kick returner. The recognition followed two years of all-league and all-region notice, built on being the seventh-ranked punt returner (15.7 yards per return) and 11th-ranked kickoff returner (30.1 yards per return) in the nation last season.

"You're considered one of the best in the country at what you do," Welch said. "He's certainly one of the best punt returners, kickoff returners and, I'd say, (defensive backs) too. If you were going to draw an all-star team up in Division III, he certainly should be somebody's who's on it."

Nice honor if you can get it, and irrelevant: Carney sustained a high left-ankle sprain in the Bombers' final preseason scrimmage and hasn't returned a kick since. Opportunities at defensive back, Carney's other responsibility, have gradually increased, however.

As a sophomore and junior, Carney worked mostly as a nickel back, the fifth defensive back in pass coverage, often rotated toward an opponent's top receiver. He recently earned his first Ithaca start at cornerback, in a 27-10 win over Utica (N.Y.) College on Oct. 4. Missing just the season opener with his injury, Carney has contributed 16 tackles and an interception for a Bomber defense that ranks in the top quarter of the NCAA's 242 Division III football schools.

Ithaca was 5-2 after a 32-7 win over Salisbury (Md.) on Saturday.

"He's always been this sponge of an athlete, watching me and my sisters," recalled Jake Carney, whose siblings also included a competitive swimmer, Laura. "He grew up with us, kind of always around sports, around these types of things. … He just gets it.

"Also, what I've found that is most important besides football is he is the most comfortable person in his own skin I've ever met. I was not that comfortable as he is at his current age. He is one of the most welcoming, nonjudgmental yet competitive people you will meet."

"He's always had a kind of perfect demeanor about him," Hemenway added. "It must be the perfect combination for all of our missteps and mistakes in temperament."

Ithaca football needs that in its captains.

The Bomber Tradition

Ithaca College has been a force on the NCAA D-III football scene for more than 40 years. The Bombers found their first regular success under coach Dick Lyon in the 1960s, but the program took off with Ithaca's hiring of Jim Butterfield to succeed Lyon in 1968 followed by the NCAA's decision to establish Division III athletics in 1973.

Butterfield guided Ithaca to back-to-back 10-1 seasons and berths in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl, the D-III national championship game, in 1974 and '75. He posted 23 straight winning seasons until his retirement, making the Stagg Bowl five more times and winning national titles in 1979, 1988 and 1991.

"When we went to Division III, in only its second year, that's when we went to the Stagg Bowl," said Welch, an Ithaca grad and former running back who succeeded Butterfield as head coach in 1993. "That's really what created the excitement, playing for a national championship in Division III."

It's been Welch's challenge since to maintain the level of performance established in the 1970s, when he played for Butterfield, and beyond, when he returned to his alma mater as an assistant coach. While Ithaca hasn't won a national crown during his 20 years in charge, the Bombers have had winning records in 19 of those campaigns, regularly making the NCAA tournament and winning three ECAC regional championships.

"Tradition is what came before and where we are right now," Welch said. "If we're talking about a football program, it's what this program has achieved or not achieved. I believe we have a great tradition in the sense of not only wins and losses but how we do things.

"You talk about family; that's a big word, and we believe our teams are very close, not only within the team members but the family members that are a part of it, the coaches, the alumni. Once you're in the Ithaca Bomber family, then you're in. It never stops."

Carney's peers voted him defensive captain for the 2014 season at the team's spring banquet. Carney jumped into the role, which requires night-before-the-game speeches and occasional bad-cop reminders on the field or in the weight room.

"You're in a place like this, you see the national championship trophies and you know it's a team that's been built on tradition," Carney said. "The head coach has been here forever. There's only been so many head coaches in the history of the program. You kind of get a feel that this is a tradition-rich program that knows what they're doing."

The View From Here

Through the open door of Welch's corner office at the Ceracche Center, attached to the south side of Butterfield Stadium, visitors first set sight on the Bombers' NCAA championship trophies. Multiple other awards hang on the walls inside.

Then there's the view. Buoyed by Ithaca's hilltop location and open on two sides, Welch's guests get a stunning chamber-of-commerce sight of Cayuga Lake, the city below and the surrounding highlands. The city boasts multiple waterfalls within its borders, enough that a downtown T-shirt shop does fair business hawking items embossed with the following: "Ithaca Is Gorges."

(When a colleague at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute once remarked online about the loveliness of his Troy, N.Y., office view, Joe Gladziszewski, Ithaca's associate athletics communication director, responded with a photograph of his Cayuga Lake perspective and a note: "I raise." His peer's response: "I fold.")

"I don't spend quite as much time on the Cornell side of things, but you definitely get the Ivy League feel similar to the Dartmouth students being around (in Hanover) when you interact with the Cornell students," Carney said. "It's a good thing."

The two schools stare across at each other from different hillsides overlooking downtown, Cornell to the north, Ithaca to the south. Welch's teams scrimmaged their Big Red counterparts in the preseason for years until changes in the Ivy calendar made it impossible. Still, he counts members of the Cornell athletic department among his closest friends.

The schools' students intermix academically and socially. Cornell undergraduates head to Ithaca for classes in athletic training. Welch has had players who have taken part in Cornell's on-campus ROTC program.

"The relationship, from a football viewpoint, and I think from an athletic viewpoint, is very, very healthy here," Welch said. "I know, as a former player, there was that competition. Cornell had their teams, we had ours, and that's a natural thing for young adults, young men, to do, to have that natural rivalry.

"Since I've been coaching, both as an assistant and as a head coach, the relationship we have with Cornell is just outstanding athletically. It's a little bit more of supportive atmosphere. … In terms of staff, in terms of us going to their practices and them coming to watch ours, it's just a really, really healthy atmosphere."

It is in this comfortable, tradition-rich environment that Sam Carney has thrived.

Ithaca's long football history has led many former players to enter coaching at the high school, college and professional levels. A communications studies major minoring in sports studies, Carney envisions a "dream job" of director of football operations at a larger college or perhaps entering communications research or teaching.

A kid from Kentucky, by way of New Hampshire, found his comfort zone at a college in the Finger Lakes of New York. He became part of an athletic tradition, and it's likely it won't depart from his life even as he departs from Ithaca soon.

"I do care about this program just as much; I want to lead this program doing everything I can for it," Carney said. "It's the idea of passing on those things I talk about, the Bomber tradition, the Bomber way.

"Let these kids underneath us understand what it really means, that this program matters, that this program is different. Ithaca College football is something that is a huge deal to a lot of people."