Senior sacrifices for young Griffin team

His name is Andrew DeMase, he’s a senior, business and accounting double major. He’s one of four captains of the Seton Hill University (SHU) Griffins football team and he’s looking forward to his team’s first year in NCAA and his final year on the field.

DeMase has been playing football since the age of eight and this year he plans to make all of the years of hard work and sacrifice pay off. “There’s a sense of urgency to be in my last year, the time is clearly now to win,” DeMase said.

By Chelsea Oliver

Sports Editor

His name is Andrew DeMase, he’s a senior, business and accounting double major. He’s one of four captains of the Seton Hill University (SHU) Griffins football team and he’s looking forward to his team’s first year in NCAA and his final year on the field.

DeMase has been playing football since the age of eight and this year he plans to make all of the years of hard work and sacrifice pay off. “There’s a sense of urgency to be in my last year, the time is clearly now to win,” DeMase said.

Even through multiple injuries, DeMase finds it in himself to get out on the field each week to play, and to practice hard each day. “I’ll play through injuries. This is my final year – I have my whole life to recover, I only have now to play,” said DeMase.

But along with being a captain is having the confidence in your team, and when it comes to Griffin’s football, DeMase is all about his team. “It’s a challenge because a lot of people are surprised that we are Division II, but in that locker room, we feel that we can beat anyone we come against,” he said, “…as long as we’re not beating ourselves we feel that we can win against anyone out there.”

“It’s taken a lot to get where we are, but Ivory and Jeskey helped with getting us into Division II regulation wise and the coaches have been in bigger programs themselves and have really helped us step it up to get to that level of play,” said DeMase.

As one of the ‘founding players’ of the four-year-old Griffins football program, DeMase knows the amount of hard work and sacrifices that went into getting the team this far and knows that the road does not stop here. “There are 22 seniors on the team this year and a lot of us feel that we’ve started this thing and we’ve come a long way on the field and as men, and we really need to finish on top to show what we did with four years of progress,” he said.

Though DeMase and the other 21 Griffin’s football seniors will move off the field and into the working world soon, what they built will be nourished by the upcoming classes. “Obviously when you lose 22 seniors, you’re going to lose some leadership, but under us are a lot of good players,” DeMase said, “[The younger players] I think will be able to take what we’ve done, and what we will do this season, and really run with it. The freshman class brings in a lot of new talent and the recruiting is getting better with each year. The team will keep getting better even when we’re not around.”

DeMase, who plans to stick around after graduation in May, and become the Griffins’ graduate assistant while obtaining his Masters degree at SHU, is hopeful of what the program will become as he and the other seniors step to the sidelines. “They’ll be good, they have more than enough to win. They just have to continue to make the sacrifices,” he said.