Tech reserve majors in team, chemistry

A-back Robert Godhigh has at least two or three more whirling, dust-devil-like plays to break out before packing up his petite jersey and going home.

For Coray Carlson, it would be nice if he just got released from the sideline for a snap. If only as a parting gift, a token from that part of his college experience in which chemistry was about guys snapping towels in a locker room and not about, well, actual chemicals.

This is not a star’s story. Most of them in college football aren’t. They just go untold.

Carlson showed up at Tech in 2010, a lightweight safety from Marietta’s Lassiter High who actually applied to school on the basis of its course catalogue, not its football guide. He thought he’d become an architect. At the last moment, he went in to meet the coaches and to ask about walking onto the team.

Carlson believed he’d gain weight, fill out like his old man did back when he was a DB at Iowa State. But his metabolism revved like Sprint Cup car at the start line. Two summers ago, Tech’s nutritionist put him on a 6,500-calorie-a-day diet in an attempt to bulk him up. He lost two pounds.

There is no need for any of the fancy computing tools on campus to count Carlson’s appearances for the Yellow Jackets this season. He has darted into six games, all at the closing moments, accumulating four solo tackles. His highlights came last season, when injuries and suspensions cast him into the nickel-back role for the opening game — a Monday night on ESPN — at Virginia Tech.

“That was awesome,” Carlson said. “It felt almost like a video game. I was so focused on the players in front of me, I didn’t realize there were 70,000 people surrounding me.” He finished that season with a handful of tackles and even one sack (against Virginia).

Mostly, Carlson was one of those eager players destined to make his impact on the practice field. An earnest sort who took his satisfaction in the anonymous task of preparing others, who in turn would suck up all the playing time. Two years as a walk-on with the scout team, he gained scholarship status in 2012. That didn’t change Carlson’s outlook.

“It’s a team effort, that’s the way you have to think about it,” he said. “Whatever you do is for the team. It’s not about yourself, it’s for everybody else, that’s how I approached it. I wanted to make the person to the left of me better, the person to the right of me better and at the same time, that would help me get better. What I put on the field during practice reflected on the other guys.”

He sent the biggest ripples through the program when he changed majors in 2011, giving up architecture when the required classes were starting to bump into afternoon football practice time. Only, instead of defaulting to an easier load, he veered into chemical engineering.

His academic adviser said he was mad, that he could never balance the demands of football and those of his new major.

There was no better way to ensure that Carlson would choose the difficult path less taken.

“You tell him no and he’s going prove otherwise,” his mother Kathy said.

“When I switched over and was told I wasn’t going to be able to do it, that was kind of my motivation. I wanted to prove (the adviser) wrong. I wanted to show him that I could do this,” he said.

So, he showed him. And somewhere in the office that oversees athletic department scholarships, balloons dropped, sirens screamed, lights flashed. At least figuratively. For among the endowed scholarships at Tech’s disposal was one that hadn’t applied to one of its players since the early 2000s. The Robert G. and Irene J. Edwards Scholarship initially was earmarked for any football player majoring in chemical engineering.

One catch: Football players don’t generally do the lab coat thing. Since the scholarship was established in the 1970s, “It was only able to be awarded about once a decade, that’s what we’re averaging,” said Mindy Hyde, director of development for athletics with the Alexander-Tharpe Fund.

Little wonder that football/chemical engineering was such a rare combo. Here is the rundown of classes Carlson finished this semester: Transport Phenomena II; History of Technology and Science; Survey of Biochemistry; Quantum Physics.

You find time in there to come in and watch tape of the Clemson four-wide formation.

But even Carlson discovered that eventually, there comes a time to unbuckle the chinstrap and buckle down to something more meaningful. Carlson approached this bowl game as a crossroads. He could commit to staying on the team next season, his last year of eligibility. Or he could focus solely on his studies in an attempt to lift his 3.1 grade point average. Many prospective employers demand a 3.2 GPA or higher, he said.

For the sake of that one-tenth of a point, Carlson decided to abandon football. On track to get his degree in a year, he will for the first time experience school life outside the closed ranks of a team.

The game will scarcely miss him. There will always be some other eager second-teamer who gets by on the selfless love of football.

But he will miss it, just as much as any every-down regular.

“I’ve always played a sport growing up and the idea that this will probably be my last time playing a real competitive sport — I guess there’s intramurals, but it’s not the same — is a little hard to take,” he said.

“I’m going to miss all the guys and just the feeling of running out there on Saturdays. The crowd. The atmosphere. It has been awesome.”