After his first season of college football, Greg Rose thought it might all be over. He played his freshman year at Robert Morris, but then the coach resigned. Rose felt mentally drained, so he left the team and stopped taking classes. The next fall he worked at a GNC health and nutrition store near campus. No longer adhering to a precise schedule structured by coaches, Rose had nagging thoughts that he was late or missing something during these unusually empty days. Mostly, he felt unfulfilled.
“Every day I was waking up,” Rose said, “and I wasn’t happy where I was going.”
Only a street separated the store where Rose worked and Robert Morris’s football stadium, and he still had friends on the team. When they played during his work shifts, he could hear the cheering crowd. Meanwhile, “I was just stuck in a little box,” Rose said, and he wondered whether he gave up the sport he loved too soon.
Rose’s defensive line coach at Robert Morris had given him a phone number for Mark Duda, the coach of Lackawanna College, in case he ever wanted to return to football. For a few months, Rose didn’t call. And then during one work shift around Thanksgiving in 2018, he reached out.
“I wasn’t satisfied [with] where I was at,” Rose said, “and the only chance I had to get back into the swing of things was to go to junior college and get a second chance.”
That call turned into the critical first step on Rose’s path toward the Maryland football program. He only had one option out of DeMatha: Robert Morris. And then he had just one Power Five opportunity out of Lackawanna: Maryland. Yet here he is in College Park, thriving in his second season as an occasional starter at defensive tackle and a respected veteran for the Terrapins, who are still pursuing bowl eligibility during this final week of the regular season.
“I don’t think there’s anybody in our program that’s affected more people than what Greg Rose has done,” Coach Michael Locksley said. “And a lot is obviously because of his story.”
Rose still remembers the date he reported to Lackawanna: Jan. 18, 2019. He remembers it because that felt like the beginning of his second chance. During Rose’s one season there, he earned first-team all-conference honors and Lackawanna reached the junior college national championship. Heading into that game, Rose couldn’t leave the hotel for practice because he was so sick. Rose “had no right even having a spike on the grass, and he played anyway,” Duda said. “Some stuff, you just don’t forget.”
Rose said Duda has been like a father to him and is the reason he got to play football again. Duda, a defensive lineman at Maryland from 1979 to 1982, can go on about what made Rose stand out at Lackawanna, the way he went “100 miles an hour every single day” and how he never acted entitled.
“He had every reason in the world not to be that way,” Duda said. “Couldn’t he have really pounded his fists to the moon and said, ‘I got screwed?’ ”
Instead, Rose found a place to fit in.
Yet it still felt as if coaches at major programs didn’t notice. Rose sent emails asking whether schools needed a player at his position, but nobody responded. Some coaches followed him on Twitter, but they didn’t contact him. The coronavirus pandemic, which shut down the typical recruiting process just after Rose’s season at Lackawanna, complicated the matter.
Duda’s relationship with Locksley goes back decades, and Rose’s high school coach at DeMatha, Elijah Brooks, is now the running backs coach for the Terps. So when Rose began talking with the Maryland staff, he finally made progress toward his hopes of playing at the Football Bowl Subdivision level.
“If Coach Brooks wasn’t here, then I probably wouldn’t be at a Power Five school,” Rose said. “There was no Power Five school that was ready to take a chance on me.”
Maryland could offer only a walk-on spot, but Rose said he didn’t mind that challenge. He arrived on campus in the summer of 2020, and his work could begin. Even then, the season dealt one blow after another. The Terps’ shortened schedule featured only five games, and Rose was not academically eligible at the start of the season because the semester off set him back in his progress toward his degree. He appeared in two games, but then he contracted the coronavirus and couldn’t play in what turned out to be Maryland’s final game.
So in the lead-up to the 2021 season, Rose remained an unheralded walk-on. Then Kevin Durant mentioned the senior by name on a video call during a team meeting. The staff surprised Rose with a scholarship just before this season began, and the NBA star, who is from Prince George’s County, helped share the news.
Maryland hosted motivational speakers during preseason camp, and the players usually attended meetings afterward, then grabbed a snack and headed back to the hotel. After meetings this day, staffers instructed the players to regroup as a team. Rose thought maybe there would be a second motivational speaker. Instead, this meeting was about him. Rose’s girlfriend and six-month-old daughter surprised him there to be part of the announcement.
“Every night, I go back to that same moment,” Rose said, “because that’s the moment that changed my life.”
The scholarship lifted stress, and the chaotic scene of joyous teammates showed they understood the value of this accomplishment. Rose vowed to hold on to the hunger that helped him reach this point and the mind-set that he gets to play. He knows what it’s like when the sport is missing.
Now a regular contributor, Rose has started six games this season, and he’s second on the team with five sacks — none more important than the two he recorded on back-to-back plays late against Illinois. Rose’s critical contributions forced a third and 28, and the Illini had to punt. Maryland’s offensive drive began with 47 seconds to go, and the Terps kicked a game-winning field goal. Duda doesn’t get to watch the Terps often, but he saw this sequence live because Maryland played on a Friday and Lackawanna already had arrived at its hotel for a road game.
Duda reflects on those moments and Rose’s journey, and he says, “What were his odds?” He thinks about how often those who leave school never return. He realizes Rose took a chance by heading off to an unfamiliar junior college in Scranton, Pa. And then once a player makes it to a Power Five program as a walk-on, how often does he earn a scholarship and a key role?
Duda laughs as he tries to explain the improbability of each step in Rose’s path. But he doesn’t like to describe this as a long shot that panned out. That makes it feel as if it were a gamble, and that’s not how Rose perceived this mission.
“He wasn’t wishing on a star that he could be a defensive lineman at Maryland,” Duda said. “He went and proactively — day by day by day — created it.”
