Senior Boots His Way into the Record Books

With a new head coach on the sidelines and a new quarterback taking the snaps, this may be viewed as a transition year for Bentley football. But the 2009 team has one constant in kicker Tyler McNamara ’10. His powerful and steady right leg should help the Falcons field one of the best special-teams units in the Northeast-10.

The Medway, Mass., native has already rewritten the Bentley record book in the kicking department. He enters his final year as the program’s all-time leader in field goals with 28 — 10 more than the next closest Falcon and tied for the most-ever in NE-10 history.

In addition, McNamara owns the single-season record for most field goals made: 14 as a sopho- more in 2007. That achievement earned him a first-team All-Conference selection. Last season, he landed second team All-Conference honors, after going eight for 13 on field goal attempts and an impressive 22 for 23 on extra-point attempts (95.7 percent).

McNamara started playing football as a fifth-grader, with guidance from his father, Tom, who graduated from Bentley in 1982. Medway did not have a Pop Warner team at the time, but Tom and others from the neighborhood got the program up and running. The younger McNamara has been kicking ever since.

“It felt natural to me and came relatively easy,” he says of the decision to be a kicker. His high school career would also include stints as running back, safety and linebacker. “I did OK at the other positions, but pretty well at kicking.”

At Bentley, he was quick to make a positive impression. McNamara’s first game was against No. 18 East Stroudsburg, which had routed the Falcons 72-17 in the season-opener a year earlier. With the team trailing 7-6 and less than 10 seconds remaining, McNamara calmly drove a 30-yard field goal through the posts to give Bentley the upset win — in a driving rainstorm, no less.

“The weather was terrible and everyone was just miserable, but my teammates did a great job moving the ball down the field on the final drive to set me up with an easier kick,” he explains. “The kick itself was a knuckleball that side-winded through the uprights. But I was thrilled because of how badly the team had been beaten the year before.”

This fall, McNamara and the Falcons are well positioned to rebound from last year’s 5-6 record, which was only the third sub-.500 sea- son in the program’s 31 years. Fifteen starters return from 2008 — seven on offense, eight on defense — giving head coach Thom Boerman an experienced group to work with.

And if any of the season’s games should depend on a last-second kick, the Falcons will be in good hands.

“My teammates work so hard and play so tough,” McNamara says. “If a game comes down to a field goal in the final seconds, I want them to know in their hearts and minds that I am going to make the kick.”