Notre Dame vs. Army features Long Island's Rino Monteforte and Casey Reynolds in significant roles
Army wide receiver Casey Reynolds catches a pass and scores a touchdown against Florida Atlantic on Sept. 7, 2024 in Boca Raton, Fla. Credit: AP/Doug Murray
Being the leading receiver for the Army football team is a little like being the best saltwater fisherman in Nebraska. There just aren’t a whole lot of opportunities to demonstrate your skills.
This is an offense that in nine games this season has completed only 41 passes. Casey Reynolds has caught 12 of them for 325 yards.
“You know what you signed up for,” the senior cadet from Cold Spring Harbor said. “It’s like the Academy as a whole. You are not coming here for yourself or for personal accolades or stats. You are coming here to be part of something bigger than yourself. That kind of encapsulates what it is like to be a receiver here, too. You are not coming here to be a receiver, you are coming here to block defensive ends and outside linebackers and corners and safeties, not necessarily catch touchdown passes.”
Reynolds has managed to haul in three of those this season, though, and may have a chance to add to his total when unbeaten Army plays Notre Dame at Yankee Stadium on Saturday night.
‘This is why you come to Notre Dame’
The game features two of the most historically significant programs in the nation and celebrates the centennial of one of the most immortalized events in all of sports: the 1924 meeting between the schools from which the “Four Horsemen” nickname was bestowed upon the Notre Dame backfield by sportswriter Grantland Rice.
It’s a riveting present-day matchup as well, with one loss between them, that could determine whether either or both teams make the 12-school playoff bracket in December and where they might be seeded.
Reynolds will be one of two Long Island products on the field for the prime-time event playing important but overlooked roles. He’s the Army receiver who isn’t asked to receive all that much, while Rino Monteforte, a junior from North Babylon who played for Kellenberg, is the long snapper for Notre Dame.
“This is why you come to Notre Dame, for opportunities like this,” Monteforte said. “It’s so incredible. When I came here, who would ever think I would get to come home and play in front of a home crowd in my home state?
“I’m just so excited.”
Notre Dame long-snapper Rino Monteforte Credit: Notre Dame Athletics/Jeffrey Myers
So are the 75 or so family members and friends who will be attending the game to root for him, a number that includes the 55 lucky ones who will get to make the trip to and from the Bronx on a bus rented by Monteforte’s mother, Justina.
Reynolds won’t have as large a contingent, given that he usually plays his home games just up the Palisades Parkway and his closest fans get to see him there often.
“Army is not too far,” he said, “but the Bronx is that much closer, so it’s super-nice.”
Their journey to this moment
Both players had to fight and scrap to get to this point. Reynolds didn’t have any college offers when he graduated from Cold Spring Harbor and attended Deerfield Academy, a prep school in Massachusetts. That’s where the Army coaches first saw him.
“He plays well in our system,” Army coach Jeff Monken said. “He does a really good job blocking. He takes a lot of pride in that. He has to. He’s not particularly fast, not particularly big. He’s just a really good athlete . . . He’s having his best year so far. He is playing his best football right now.”
Reynolds also plays lacrosse for Army in the spring.
Monteforte always wanted to play college football as an offensive lineman until he attended a camp for the position in South Carolina as a seventh-grader.
“I was 5-5, 115 pounds, going against kids who were 6-2 and 280 pounds,” he recalled. “I realized from that point on it wasn’t going to be something that would work for me. So I had to decide: How am I going to play college football? How am I going to find a way?”
After typing “How to long snap” into a search engine and watching some YouTube videos, Monteforte taught himself the skill.
He became good enough at it to be recruited by Buffalo and planned to play there. Late in his senior season at Kellenberg, though, Notre Dame came calling with a chance for him to be a preferred walk-on with their program. He visited the South Bend campus, saw the domes and the banners and signed a letter of intent before you could say “Touchdown Jesus.”
After two years as a backup, he’s the primary long snapper this season.
More than just a ‘Rudy’ story
“It’s such a beautiful experience when you go out there because everything else is just canceled out,” Monteforte said of his upside-down view of the game. “My only focus is on snapping the ball through the holder’s hand every single time. Once I see that snap hit the guy’s hand, protect, see the ball go through the uprights and celebrate a little with my teammates, then I am right back to being a normal person on the sideline. But it’s such a beautiful, spiritual experience when you go out there.”
At Notre Dame, Monteforte’s ambitions and abilities have kept growing, even if he hasn’t. At 5-7, he’s the shortest player on the team. It leads to some obvious comparisons to another “five-foot-nothing” walk-on of Notre Dame — and Hollywood — renown. It’s not something he revels in.
“The first away game I ever traveled to, the fans from N.C. State were like ‘Rudy! Congratulations, Rudy! You made the travel squad!’ ” Monteforte said, cringing. “But at the end of the day, I earned my spot here. I’m not here by mistake. I believe in my abilities. I believe in my hard work and my preparation and making sure it’s as detailed as possible so I can go out there and execute my job.
“People can say, ‘This is a Rudy story’ and that’s great for the press and all that, but at the end of the day, I believe in myself and I am confident in my abilities and I know that I’m no fluke.”
So now these two unheralded Long Islanders will take part in one of college football’s most celebrated rivalries, at one of sports’ most hallowed venues, all about an hour’s drive from where each grew up. And while they don’t play positions that garner much outside attention, both believe they are in the perfect spot.
“It’s truly amazing the types of people who come here,” Reynolds said of his experiences at West Point.
Said Monteforte of Notre Dame: “There is no other place I would rather be.”
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.