DEL.ICIO.USUGA walk-on makes history with punt blocks
Renner’s blocks in consecutive games believed to be a first
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, October 06, 2008
Athens — He was the Georgia football player almost no one had heard of.
Then out of nowhere he blocked a punt against Arizona State, and another a week later against Alabama. Suddenly, Zach Renner was on Bulldog Nation’s radar.
Pouya Dianat/pdianat@ajc.com
Zack Renner was not pursued by any major colleges coming out high school, but he’s been a force on UGA’s special teams.
“Some people I don’t even know were coming up and saying, ‘Hey, you going to get another one?’ ” Renner said.
Renner is one of those welcomed stories that provide a bit of balance to the runaway hype of college football’s recruiting machine. Not pursued by major-college coaches while attending high school in Connecticut, not rated by any of the recruiting services, Renner got on Georgia’s football team the unglamorous way: He walked on.
No scholarship. No fanfare. Just a guy who wanted to play.
OK, he’s not a star. As a split end, he’s so far down the depth chart as to be invisible. But he has gotten a chance on special teams, and on two recent occasions he was the most prominent player on the field.
When Renner, an 18-year-old red-shirt freshman, blocked punts in back-to-back games, he became the first Georgia player to block two punts in a season since 2004. And the player who did it then was somewhat more famous: the All-American David Pollack.
Georgia has no record of any player before Renner blocking punts in two consecutive games, although the school’s punt-block records go back only to 1985. And based on those records, Renner is one shy of the school’s single-season record of three blocked punts, set in 1999 by Kendrell Bell, who went on to become an NFL defensive rookie of the year.
So how did Zach Renner get in such company, if only fleetingly?
He grew up in Monroe, Conn., and attended New Canaan High School. He was a running back who moved to wide receiver after a knee injury his senior season. And like many high school students, he had trouble deciding where he wanted to go to college.
He considered the likes of Lehigh, Villanova and Hamilton, “but it never clicked like, ‘Oh, I want to go there.’ “
Unlike teammates who got their introduction to the Georgia campus on recruiting visits, Renner got his when, as a high school senior, he visited a friend who was a UGA freshman.
“The minute I left, I was like, ‘That’s the school I want,’ ” he said.
While on campus, he stopped by the football offices and chatted with Joe Tereshinski, director of Georgia’s walk-on program.
Renner’s first concern, though, was just to be accepted for admission as an out-of-state student, football or not. Once enrolled in fall 2007, “I figured I had got the hard part done. I got into the school. So I might as well try football.”
On Renner’s first day in the locker room, an equipment manager looked at the 5-foot-11, 180-pound walk-on, who is leaning toward a major in accounting, and asked: “You a running back or a wide receiver?”
Tough question.
Wide receiver, Renner decided.
“I’m not one to get star-struck ever, but on my first day of practice, the wide receivers come and introduce themselves to me: [Mohamed] Massaquoi, Kenny Harris, all these guys,” he said. “The whole summer before, I was staring at the roster, sizing myself up: ‘Am I going to be able to do this or what?’ “
Georgia head coach Mark Richt says the test of a walk-on typically is to handle off-season conditioning drills and to do well enough on the practice field as a scout-teamer or special-teamer to get noticed.
“Big Zach — he was very athletic, always a hard worker,” Richt said. “You saw a guy who wanted to impress.”
Renner impressed in obscurity until he broke out on national television with blocks of Arizona State and Alabama punts the past two games.
He felt desperate to block the first one, in the victory at Arizona State, because he had missed his assignment on a Georgia punt return earlier in the game.
“On the sideline, I’m saying to myself, ‘If we run the block, I have to block it,’ ” he recalled. “I’m always in danger, I feel, of getting demoted because of [being] a walk-on. I said, ‘I need to block this kick; I don’t have any choice.’
“So [coach Jon Fabris] calls the block, and I come out on the field, just running it through my head over and over. And everything kind of goes silent, and the ball is snapped. And I come off it, and nobody even touches me. I just come through and get the ball. I wish I had gotten it a little cleaner.”
A week later, in the second half of the loss to Alabama in Sanford Stadium, Renner did it again.
“I came off the ball and just saw it open up in front of me and just tried to get what I could on the ball,” he said. “I ended up getting my right hand on it.
“I lost my mind. I went nuts.”
The walk-on would love another such moment Saturday against Tennessee.
“It’s really addicting,” he said.
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