How ‘gritty’ Grant Calcaterra went from EMT trainee to a quietly reliable part of the Eagles’ offense

Grant Calcaterra may have been one percentage point away from never playing football again.

It’s hard to imagine the Eagles tight end, occupying a significant but sometimes subtle role in the team’s offense this season, went so far down a path away from the game. In truth, a single question on an exam to become an ambulance driver for a fire department in Los Angeles that would fast-track him toward firefighting made the difference that landed him in the Eagles’ offensive huddle instead.

“I studied my [butt] off,” Calcaterra told The Inquirer. “To pass it, you have to get a 75%. I got a 74%. I was obviously really upset, it was such a big opportunity. But I told the guys in the tight end room, if I would have passed that, I probably would have been doing that right now.”

In the lead-up to the Eagles’ trip to Calcaterra’s native Southern California to play the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday, the 25-year-old recounted just how close he was to the point of no return in pursuit of a career as a firefighter.

A worrisome string of concussions at the University of Oklahoma drove him to medical retirement and into a two-week crash course to become a certified emergency medical technician in Chandler, Ariz. He made it through the class, applied for jobs, failed some tests, passed some others, and ended up one day away from starting a job on an ambulance for a different department when the gut feeling pulling him back toward the game finally won over.

Stemming from a few evenings spent catching passes from a former high school teammate in a basketball gym less than an hour away from SoFi Stadium, Calcaterra returns to the area this weekend as the second tight end on the depth chart and an unsung member of a star-laden group of skill players on the offensive side.

Whether it’s blocking players much bigger than his listed 6-foot-4, 240 pounds in the run game, taking advantage of the space created by A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith in the pass game, or diving on a fourth-quarter fumble to bail out position mate Dallas Goedert last Thursday against the Washington Commanders, Calcaterra has earned a reputation for doing “the dirty work” for his teammates.

“If you look at this offense, there’s a lot of mouths to feed, we’ve got some ballers on this team,” said fellow Eagles tight end C.J. Uzomah. “What he’s asked to do, he’s all-in. And when his opportunity comes, he’s there. ... It is a thankless job, I think tight end in general is sometimes overlooked. I know we’ve gotten a lot of pub recently, but especially that second tight end, you’re asked to do a lot of the grimy, dirty work and you don’t get a lot of thanks.”

Goedert added, “Thank God he failed that one [test.] So he could be there with us.”

Sitting at a lunch table a few days into EMT training, Calcaterra reluctantly unlocked his phone, pulled up a video and showed his classmates some of his best moments on a football field.

“He didn’t like to gloat about it, I think we had to kind of beg him to show us,” said Ryan Myers, a firefighter for the Modesto (Calif.) Fire Department who went through EMT training with Calcaterra. “All of us were like, ‘Why the hell are you here?’”

Calcaterra’s answer traces back to the Oklahoma Sooners’ practice facility, when the all-conference tight end took an awkward fall after catching a slot fade and hit his head on the turf.

It was his third concussion in one calendar year, leading to a recommendation from Oklahoma medical staffers that he either take an extended time away from the sport or medically retire.

Earlier this month, Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts, who overlapped with Calcaterra at Oklahoma in 2019, said he still remembered the concussion that put the tight end’s football future in jeopardy.

“We don’t talk enough about the things he’s had to overcome,” Hurts said. “I was at practice when I saw a terrible concussion and it was over for him. For him to be able to come back and play the game, I always pray for his health and hope for the best in terms of his safety on the field. But this was a game that he was ready to walk away from and he came back, and I’m fortunate to have him here.”

Said South Carolina coach Shane Beamer, who was Calcaterra’s position coach with the Sooners: “You felt for him because you knew how talented a guy he was. To see him go through that, he always kept his spirits up and had the right frame of mind about things, which I really respected.”

Once he made the decision to medically retire, Calcaterra started the two-week program in Arizona to get his EMT license. The course coincided with the initial lockdowns in response to the pandemic in 2020 and featured 14-hour days in which Calcaterra and about a dozen others “pretty much lived there.”

A handful of candidates dropped out before the end of the class, something foreshadowed by a brutally honest introduction to the course on the first day.

Half of you won’t pass the class, half of that group won’t get their EMT license, and half of those people won’t even use these skills long-term. Only two or three of you will actually become firemen.

Calcaterra heard the warning, but insisted it wouldn’t apply to him: “I was like, ‘That’s going to be [expletive] me, I’m going to be a fireman.’”

Calcaterra’s friend Myers was among the only ones to actually beat the odds, although he said Calcaterra’s return to football was the lone thing keeping him from also becoming a firefighter in his home state.

“We knew, if there were going to be two of us, we’d be the two to make it to become firefighters,” Myers said. “It kind of seemed like, if anyone was going to do it, it was going to be him.”

Calcaterra did come awfully close. Even after missing out on the ambulance driving job with the Huntington Beach Fire Department, in which he had connections and a promising path toward becoming a firefighter, he still found a job elsewhere to preserve his chances to work his way into the job he wanted.

The itch to play — or at least to see if he could — was back by that point, though. A one-year wellness check with a specialist left him with the option to return, and a few sessions running routes with K.J. Costello, a former teammate at Santa Margarita Catholic High School and a three-year starter at Stanford, left him wanting more.

“That kind of got my juices flowing a bit,” Calcaterra said of the throwing sessions at a basketball gym in Los Angeles. “And then I was supposed to start my first day as an EMT. Working on an ambulance. And the night before, I was like, ‘I’m not coming.’”

Josh Martin still remembers the visual of Calcaterra celebrating his first touchdown of the 2021 season.

Graduated from Oklahoma and ready to return to football, Calcaterra committed to SMU and reunited with Tanner Mordecai, another Sooners transfer who was ironically the quarterback who threw him the slot fade that momentarily ended his football career.

» READ MORE: Eagles’ Grant Calcaterra discusses ‘workhorse’ Jalen Hurts and Dallas Goedert’s impact

Mordecai was also the one to deliver Calcaterra’s emphatic returning moment a year and change later, hitting the tight end for a touchdown that led to one of Martin’s favorite memories over a decade of coaching.

“You just see the emotion from him after he scored,” said Martin, who coached tight ends at SMU and is now an analyst on Nebraska’s coaching staff. “He was so excited; obviously we were up, everybody was excited, but it was a moment like, ‘Man, I made the right decision. I did the right thing, I came back, bet on myself, and went against all odds.’

“It was a really special moment,” Martin added. “It was kind of like a movie, truth be told. And he went off that game.”

Calcaterra finished the game against Abilene Christian with two touchdowns and finished that season with 38 catches for 465 yards and four touchdowns. Although he was primarily used from a receiver’s alignment at Oklahoma, Martin said Calcaterra took a vested interest in becoming a capable blocker as well to round out his game and become “a complete tight end.”

Still, on the spectrum of tight ends capable of getting their hands dirty in the run game and ones that serve more as oversized receivers, Calcaterra was much closer to the latter by the time the Eagles selected him in the sixth round of the 2022 NFL draft.

He wasn’t called into action much as an in-line blocking tight end in the first few years of his career as a result, but entered this season as the No. 2 tight end on the depth chart expected to handle tougher blocking assignments to free up Goedert to take on more of a receiving role.

» READ MORE: There’s a Philly bar in Portland where Eagles fans gather to watch the game and feel like they’re back home

Especially as the Eagles pivoted toward a more run-heavy approach midway through this season, Calcaterra’s new role often matches him up with defensive linemen who outsize him by a fair amount.

That’s why Uzomah, a 10-year veteran who signed to the Eagles active roster earlier this month, said the in-line tight end role Calcaterra plays is among the hardest in football.

“I’m obviously extremely biased, but I think aside from quarterback and corner, tight end is the hardest position,” Uzomah said. “The things that we’re asked to do — we’re asked to block [6-5, 265-pound teammate Josh Sweat] one-on-one sometimes and we’re like, ‘All right, let’s buckle up and let’s get this done.’ ... There’s a lot of talk about guys that are maybe quote-unquote undersized coming out of college. But when you’ve got somebody that’s willing, I think that’s the main thing. He’s willing to go put his face on somebody.”

Added Eagles right tackle Lane Johnson: “You’ve got to be gritty. He’s willing to go in there and block for guys. Some of those plays, he has to go a long way and smack somebody, he builds up a lot of speed. He’s done a good job, I feel like he’s really grown the past two years as a blocker.”

Partly due to Goedert missing three games with a hamstring injury and making him the primary tight end for a short stint, Calcaterra has 17 catches for 216 yards this season.

His contributions go beyond the numbers, though. In an offense that tilts so dramatically toward star receivers Brown and Smith, and running back Saquon Barkley, Calcaterra sometimes serves as the release valve when defenses overcommit to stopping the Eagles’ most impactful skill players.

Even more often, though, he’s one of the team’s most demonstrative players whenever Barkley breaks off a big run that he played a part in.

“When a play pops, it’s just so exciting being one of the reasons that it pops,” Calcaterra said. “I get as excited just like an O-lineman does. Like, Lane, whenever he sees a big play, he’s going crazy. It’s just fun, it’s exciting to know that I had a key block and to drill it all week and for it to work, it’s exciting.”

The Eagles play in Week 12 against the Los Angeles Rams. Join Eagles beat reporters Olivia Reiner and EJ Smith as they dissect the hottest storylines surrounding the team on Gameday Central, live from SoFi Stadium.