Kiski Area grad Jack Colecchi earns national recognition for academics while playing new position again for Cal (Pa.) football

Cal (Pa.) football coach Gary Dunn rattles off a long list of compliments when talking about junior tight end Jack Colecchi.

Leader. Great teammate. An example. First one to sign up for a community service project.

In short, the Kiski Area graduate is a well-rounded guy.

That perhaps is best reflected in the way Colecchi carries himself as the quintessential student-athlete. As a student, he earned his undergrad degree in business administration with a 3.54 GPA. He is working toward his master’s degree and holds a 3.67 GPA in those courses.

As an athlete, he is playing — and starting at — his third position for the Vulcans.

“He has done everything we’ve ever asked him to do without blinking an eye,” said Dunn, in his eighth season leading the Vulcans.

Hopping from wide receiver to linebacker to tight end — more on that in a bit — hasn’t seemed to faze Colecchi. But recently he was taken aback by a development off the field: Colecchi was named a semifinalist for the William V. Campbell Trophy, which recognizes the best scholar-athlete in the country.

The award considers student-athletes across all three levels of the NCAA as well as the NAIA. From those thousands of candidates, 201 semifinalists were chosen, and Colecchi was one of only three from the PSAC and only 15 from NCAA Division II.

The National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame, which presents the award, will name up to 14 finalists Oct. 25, and each finalist will receive an $18,000 post-graduate scholarship.

“I really wasn’t expecting it. It was kind of just out of the blue,” Colecchi said. “I was really surprised at first, but I guess it’s just a testament to what I’ve done academically. I was really excited about it, and it just felt really good to be nominated for something like that.”

His ever-changing roles with the football team, meanwhile, are a testament to what he has done athletically. He was recruited as a wide receiver, and, at 6-foot-1 and 205 pounds, he made for an imposing target. He redshirted his freshman year (2019) then had his second season wiped out by the covid-19 pandemic.

He continued to work as a receiver during the down time, and, in 2021, he appeared in all 10 games and made one start at receiver, catching three passes for 85 yards.

By this time, Colecchi had grown 2 inches and put on 20 pounds, and that came in handy the following season. In 2022, the Vulcans were thin at outside linebacker, and Dunn and his staff believed they had the perfect person to fill the void.

“Coach Dunn came to me and said, ‘Hey, listen, we think you’re the one guy who can do it,’ ” Colecchi said. “ ‘We’d like to see you play outside linebacker.’ So last year, I took on that role. I took it happily. I enjoyed it.

“I’m not going to lie: It was pretty hard. It’s an entirely different environment over there and an entirely different style of play. … It took me the whole spring and probably a game or two to get to the point where I thought I could compete at that position.”

Colecchi posted 25 total tackles during his season at linebacker. Nine of those tackles went for loss, and 3¹⁄₂ of those were sacks.

But just as Colecchi, now 6-3, 240, was settling in as a linebacker, he switched positions again. The 2023 Vulcans are thin at tight end, and when injury depleted the position further, Colecchi stepped up to fill the void.

“The whole transition from linebacker to tight end, that was a talk between me and Coach Dunn,” said Colecchi, adding that he sees himself as more of an offensive player anyway. “That really wasn’t him coming to me like, ‘We need you to play.’ That was more of a, ‘Hey, maybe I could try this out.’ That was a little more at my discretion.

“I just knew what we had at the outside linebacker position. We had extreme depth, and we still do have extreme depth. We really didn’t have a lot of depth at tight end … so I thought I could help out the team on the offensive side of the ball this year and let the depth at outside linebacker kind of take over.”

All the pieces seemed to be fitting together nicely for Cal through the first half of the season. Through their Oct. 7 win over IUP, the Vulcans are 4-1 and in 3-0 in the PSAC West. Huge games with Slippery Rock (Oct. 21) and Gannon (Nov. 4) remain.

Colecchi has started at tight end each game. Perhaps surprisingly, though, he has caught only two passes, both against IUP (totaling 86 yards). That, Dunn said, has nothing to do with Colecchi’s ability to play the position.

“It’s kind of funny because he’s a really good threat in the pass game, but, for whatever reason, the ball really hasn’t found him so far,” Dunn said. “But he’s selfless. He plays our on-the-line tight end. He plays our H-back. He does a lot of the gritty, a lot of the dirty work as far as blocking, lead blocking, iso blocking.

“I think as the season moves on, you’re going to see him start to put some stats up receiving because he is a threat.”

Added Colecchi: “Obviously, everyone wants to be the guy who gets the ball thrown to them a million times. … But I do take a good deal of pride in just being able to do those little things that go unnoticed.”

Colecchi technically has one year of athletic eligibility remaining between his redshirt and his “bonus” covid year. He said he has not yet decided if he will use it, and his desire to use it, he said, seems to change daily.

That choice will come later. In the meantime, Colecchi and the Vulcans will continue to push for a PSAC championship. It’s a goal Colecchi said he believes is attainable despite the relative youth of the lineup.

“I think with a young team comes that hunger for success and that drive,” he said. “Even in practice, we compete a lot harder than we used to. We’ve got a real hungry team. We’re scrappers. This team is a bunch of fighters.”