Keeping the faith as a football walk-on at Texas A&M

Before walking onto the football team at Texas A&M, Sam Salz had never played organized football outside of the playground. Salz grew up attending an Orthodox Jewish high school in Merion, Kohelet Yeshiva, which was far too small for a football team.

Salz’s primary exposure to football was watching the Eagles on television.

Still, Salz, a Merion Station native, “very randomly” had the desire to play college football. Without a team to play for, he started teaching himself, through film and video tutorials on YouTube.

“I used YouTube and TikTok and the internet to do as much research as I could, but it doesn’t really prepare you for the basic lexicon of the game,” Salz said. “… It wasn’t just not playing football in high school. I didn’t really know even what the positions were.”

At Texas A&M, Salz tried to navigate the process of actually trying out for the team. After sending a number of unanswered emails to various members of the athletic department, Salz tried to find out his course of action to train for a tryout. He decided to go straight to the source — then-head coach Jimbo Fisher, who hosted a weekly radio show on Wednesday nights.

“When I met him the first time, I looked him directly in the eyes, and said, ‘My name is Sam Salz, I’m going to walk onto the team,’” Salz said.

After the show ended, Fisher gave him the information for how to watch the team practice.

Salz attended the practice and noticed there was open space outside the practice facility, where he could train while watching the team go through drills. That field is no longer open to the public, but during his freshman year, Salz learned the team’s training schedule and practiced from the other side of the fence, learning more drills and visualizing his ultimate goal, to make the team.

But after a year of training, without even a guarantee of an opportunity, there was no tryout the following fall. So Salz did the only thing he could think of. He went back to the radio show to ask Fisher once again for the chance to try out. A few days later, he learned he’d made the team without an official tryout.

“When I got in, there was a huge learning curve,” Salz said. “Before, I had to go seek out the knowledge. Here, the knowledge was around. I just had to piece it together correctly.”

Salz, a 5-foot-6 wide receiver, didn’t get his first taste of action until senior night — the final home game of his college career — playing one snap on a kickoff return. Salz is one of a small group of Orthodox Jewish athletes at the Division I level, and observes the Sabbath, which begins at sundown on Friday and ends sundown on Saturday.

During this time, he spends time at Texas A&M Chabad for kosher meals and prayer, and is restricted from traveling with the team, which prevents him from playing most games scheduled at the same time. When Texas A&M plays night games, Salz sits for Seudah Shlishit, the third meal of Shabbat, which occurs right before sundown. After that, he’ll head to the field with the team.

“There’s only a handful of games I can even be at,” Salz said. Everyone is totally respectful of it, and obviously that’s the thing that makes me unique.

“I’m bringing [my faith] into a field that hasn’t really been touched as much by our community. I hold a lot of pride in the fact that I get to come in and innovate, in a sense.”

His jersey number, 39, is a reference to the “39 kinds of work traditionally forbidden on the day of rest,” according to The Forward, a news publication for the American Jewish community.

Many of Salz’s teammates are also religious, but primarily Christian. Texas A&M has over 80,000 students, and only a small number of them are Jewish, and an even smaller number of Orthodox Jews. But his teammates are curious about his faith, and often ask questions.

“You’ve got to do a good job educating kids on Jewish theology and Tanakh, the Torah, the prophets and the writings,” Salz said. “... There’s a lot of respect from both sides for each other when you have those conversations, because it comes out of curiosity.”

Now, as Salz’s college football journey comes to a close, with Texas A&M’s season ending on Friday in the Las Vegas Bowl against Southern Cal, he can reflect on how he hopes to inspire future Orthodox Jewish athletes. Tackle and flag football are growing in popularity in the Orthodox community, and Salz hopes more children learn they can play while also continuing to observe religious traditions.

“A lot of what I was trying to dispel was this notion that you have to give up on the Sabbath to become successful in any realm, but especially in sports,” Salz said. “I didn’t want that to be the status quo. I hope in some way I’ve contributed to that.”