Joey Slackman's journey from Commack wrestler to Florida Gators football player

Joey Slackman tried to stand up, but his right knee would not cooperate. The University of Pennsylvania freshman was forced to limp off the mat during a wrestling tournament with a torn ACL and meniscus.

That was in January 2020.

More than four years later, the Commack High School graduate is a starting defensive lineman for the Florida Gators, who play at Mississippi State on Saturday. 

Transitioning from Ivy League wrestling to SEC football hasn't been the big issue. Injuries have been.

“The injuries are a part of me, but they don’t define me,” said Slackman, who played football and wrestled at Commack. “I wouldn’t be who I am now without all those experiences to look back on, and they kind of helped frame my mindset and my ability to push through adversity.”

A gifted athlete

Slackman arrived at Penn as a wrestler with football in the rearview mirror.

“I felt that [wrestling] gave me a mental edge over guys I’m going against [in football],” Slackman said. “It’s the toughest sport there is.”

After a 46-2 record as a junior, he went undefeated as a senior en route to winning a state title.

“He came in, and I just saw a kid who could move,” Commack wrestling coach Michael Guercio said. “He had really good feet and was athletic for a big guy. In wrestling, you don’t always get those guys. He was a rare kid who could do moves that middle and lightweights could do.”

Slackman was just as dominant on the football field, tying the Suffolk County record for sacks in a season (22) during his senior year.

“My job is to keep an offensive lineman’s hands off of me,” Slackman said. “It’s very similar to what I do in wrestling, hand-fighting, trying to work arm drags and under hooks, all similar moves I have as a defensive lineman.”

But football and wrestling didn’t take up all of Slackman’s time. He jokes that he is likely the only “300-pound defensive lineman who played tennis in high school.”

“Playing defensive line, there's a lot of lateral quickness involved, and that’s basically all that tennis is,” Slackman said.

Despite Slackman's size, then-Commack football coach Jeff DiLorenzo described Slackman as a “gentle giant,” adding that he secretly thought the defensive tackle eased up on some practices to not embarrass undersized linemen.

That didn’t mean Slackman lacked effort. He considered himself a “lazy kid growing up,” something he calls his “biggest motivation” today.

“That’s kind of what I look to when I’m dogging it in the weight room or on the field or whatever,” Slackman, 23, said. “I look back to that chubby, lazy kid and think, ‘I don’t really want to go back there.’ ”

Slackman is now 6-4 and 300 pounds.

Another injury setback

Shortly after Slackman underwent surgery on his knee in February 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The Ivy League canceled sports for the 2020-21 academic year, and Slackman opted to take a gap year. That was when he decided to go back to football while also wrestling.

In February 2021, a few weeks after being cleared to return from his knee surgery, Slackman was dealt another setback when he tore his right pectoral muscle. He was facing a crossroads: drop his dreams, or keep working to overcome another obstacle.

For Slackman, it was an easy decision.

The chest injury led him to Miguel Rivera, who joined Penn as the assistant strength and conditioning coach and head of football performance in the summer of 2019. When Slackman first told Rivera he wanted to wrestle and play football , the coach was concerned it would be too much to handle.

“It’s very rare," Rivera said. "You have to be a different kind of kid, mentally. You have to be a very hard-working individual, a very structured person, and that’s who Joey is.”

Rivera said a pectoral tear usually takes eight or nine months to heal, but Slackman was ready to start training in just five.

Slackman just needed a little time to knock off the football rust,

“I remember that after three weeks, he was just relentless,” Rivera said.

Slackman spent the 2021 season as a part-time player on Penn's defensive line, easing his way back into football while stepping away completely from wrestling.

"Everybody has self-doubt, but that’s the battle that I had within myself a lot,” Slackman said. “I was always confident in my ability to do things. I have conversations with my parents every single day over the phone that, even now, are the same conversations that they were then. ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to accomplish these things.’ "

In 2022, Slackman earned All-Ivy League honorable mention as a junior.

Injuries, however, would strike again. He tore his left biceps in the second-to-last game of his senior season against Harvard. Slackman still became the first Penn player since Tyler Drake in 2015 to win Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year. His 50 tackles, four sacks and 12 tackles-for-a-loss led Pro Football Focus — an organization that analyzes both collegiate and NFL players — to give him a grade of 90.5, best among all FCS defensive tackles.

'I like things that are difficult'

In November 2023, Slackman faced a very different crossroads to the one he faced years earlier as an injured wrestler.

His father, Paul Slackman, said his son was on the radar as a possible NFL draft pick heading into the 2023 season. However, his late-season bicep injury meant he wouldn’t be able to do any pre-draft testing, and coming from the Ivy League didn’t help his profile.

The Slackmans held a “family meeting” to talk it over. Using his extra year of athletic eligibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Joey Slackman decided to enter the transfer portal. The father-son duo had their eyes on the Gators before they even knew Florida could be a possibility.

“We were actually watching a Florida football game last November, and he and I looked at each other,” Paul Slackman said. “We both said at the same time that this could be a really good fit.”

He announced his transfer to Florida in December 2023, but before heading south, he graduated from Penn with a degree in political science. Slackman is now pursuing his Master's degree in sports management at Florida.

“The coaches did the best job of just laying out the framework for how we were going to turn the team around, and how I would be an integral part of that,” Slackman said. “I definitely made the right decision — I’ve loved every minute of being here — and I think we’re going to shock a lot of people. That was why I came here, because why wouldn’t you want to play the best teams every week?”

He added: “That’s something that I was really attracted to. I like things that are difficult, I like challenges … I didn’t want to just be another rotational guy that didn’t really stand out and kind of went with the bandwagon. I only have a year in a place, and I want to maximize that opportunity in every aspect.”

Playing in front of thousands of screaming college football fans each week is a stark contrast from his beginnings as a 0-star football recruit out of Commack who had set his cleats aside to wrestle.

“People would tell him, ‘People from around here, they don’t make it to what you’re describing,’ when he would tell them his aspirations,” Paul Slackman said. “He’s had a lot of different things he’s had to deal with, and he’s overcome them all.”