Championship run remembered 10 years later
RADNOR >> As Tony Canci rummaged through his closet Saturday looking for something to wear to the
10th anniversary celebration of Villanova’s 2009 national championship in football, he found the perfect accessory.
It was a blue and white pullover with the words
“2009 NCAA Division I National Champions” emblazoned over the left chest.
“I have to wear this,” the Sun Valley All-Delco thought to himself.
Wide receiver Matt Szczur, the MVP of the national championship game, sported the bling from the two biggest achievements of his athletic career. He had the Villanova national championship ring on his right index finger and the World Series ring he earned as a member of the Chicago Cubs in 2016 on his left hand.
In all, 31 players and four coaches, including former head coach Andy Talley, gathered in the O’Day Room in the Talley Athletic Center Friday and Saturday to reminisce on the magical run that culminated in a
23-21 victory over top-seeded Montana in the FCS championship game on a cold, wet December night in Chattanooga, Tenn.
The Wildcats went 14-1 that year, the only loss being a 28-24 setback at New Hampshire, which won on a pair of fourth-quarter field goals.
“We should have won that game,” said John Dempsey, All-Delco defensive back from Cardinal O’Hara.
Villanova avenged that loss with a convincing 46-7 victory at home in the quarterfinals.
The players are all in their
30s now and many are married with children. Canci, who started as a walk-on and earn a scholarship as a senior, is married with two children living in Havertown. Dempsey, a Springfield resident, has two children and a third on the way. Linebacker Terence Thomas is married and living in San Bernardino, Calif. He is a part-time football coach at Indian Springs High School and works as a finance man- ager for Enterprise. Wide re- ceiver Norman White is a project manager for a me- chanical engineering firm. He and his girlfriend just purchased their first home in Berlin, N.J.
Szczur just completed his 10th year of professional baseball. He’s a free agent. He and his wife are expecting their first child, so he would like to s1tay close to his home in Cape May, N.J. Could the Phillies be in the mix?
“We’ll see,” is all he would say.
None of the former Wildcats interviewed could believe it’s been a decade since the team won the only national title in program history. “It’s still surreal the fact that we even won, it’s still a dream,” Thomas said. “Every time I look at the clips, anytime I look at the highlights, I’m like ‘Wow. That really happened?.’”
Yes it did. The Wildcats scored twice in the second half to erase a 14-9 halftime deficit. Szczur scored on a four-yard run with 11:04 left in the game to put Villanova on top for good.
“It’s insane,” Dempsey said. “It’s crazy. I’m 30 years old and I feel like I’m a young man, but I realize I’m an old man. I still feel like it’s ‘04. We beat the Prep here to win the Catholic League championship. I commit to Villanova, come here and in ‘09 we win the national championship. It’s just crazy.”
The stories flowed of that magical season flowed freely as highlights played on a big screen. And while there were numerous moments from that season that stood out, like Szczur’s fourth-down run that kept the winning drive alive in the 14-13 semifinal victory over William & Mary and his 270-yard all-purpose performance in the national championship game, it was the closeness of the squad that the players remembered 10 years later.
“We had a collective goal,” Thomas said. “We all had one mission. That started in December of the ‘08 season. We knew we had unfinished business from the ‘08 season when we lost to James Madison in the quarterfinals. So we knew the next season we were coming with a vengeance. We knew that no one was going to be in our way.”
“There was no bickering in the locker room,” White added. “Everyone loved each other. We all got along and we knew we were good. We knew we had something special in the locker room and we did it on the field.”
“We didn’t have a lot of injuries that year,” Canci said. “That played a big factor, but in the locker room everyone was close. You could go up to anyone and talk to them. Not every year is like that. The seniors and the fifthyears can be disconnected from the freshmen on some teams, but that was not the case with us. I felt like that year everyone was connected.”
Injuries, or the lack thereof, did play an important role. The 22 players who started in the season-opening win over Temple started in the national championship game. Players missed a game or two here or there, but a total of 24 players saw action in all 15 games and several more played in 14 games.
“That was a blessing in disguise and a testament to our training staff, Tyler Waite, who’s still here, (strength coach) Justus Galac, who’s with the New York Jets, and to what we did in the offseason,” Thomas said. “We had that collective group. We were going to win.”
They did. The Wildcats won their last nine games to bring home the national title.
“Early on, I knew that we had the talent to win the whole thing,” Talley said. “I just knew it. We had a terrific defense, a can-do quarterback in Chris Whitney and a superstar in Szczur. And the surrounding cast was all team guys, no big heads. They were all just down-to-earth good kids. We had the chemistry that was necessary for a championship team. Looking back at the highlights of the national championship game, we were good. We were really good.”