(Editor's Note: This week's Feature Friday Series examines Tyler Lussier and his love for the sport of football. Morgan Miller sat down with Tyler and talked about how he fed his football fix prior to playing for the Ravens sprint football program.)

By Morgan Miller
Athletics Student Feature Writer

In the past few weeks, there has been a tremendous amount of excitement surrounding the sprint football program at Franklin Pierce. The arrival of the new sport has been especially meaningful for senior captain, Tyler Lussier, who has been playing the game since he was eight-years-old.

Lussier started his interest for football at a very young age, but didn’t immediately fall in love with the sport as much as he had liked to. “I started playing football when I was eight and since I was the same size as everyone else I played offensive line,” he said. “I hated it and I didn’t want to play football anymore.”

His hatred for the sport was short-lived when he quickly was bumped up to play quarterback, which was where his football career really began. Lussier continued to play throughout his early years and on through high school where he was on varsity his sophomore through senior seasons.  Some of the major accomplishments during his high school career included being named a two-time player of the week as a senior, being named to the All-State Academic Team and earning all-regional first-team honors as a wide receiver.

Lussier had high hopes to play college ball, but he ultimately realized that Franklin Pierce was a better option for him at that point in time.  “I was going to stay in my hometown and go to Bates college and play football there, but it was going to be almost double the money so I chose Pierce instead,” said Lussier.

The senior fullback didn’t quit on his football dreams just yet, and quickly joined the Franklin Pierce men’s rugby team to get his fix after arriving on campus.  Lussier played on the team for three years, but could not stop thinking about football. “Everyone who knew that I was playing rugby knew that all I really wanted to do was play football,” he said.

Lussier started playing for the Monadnock Marauders, a semi-professional football program out of Keene, N.H. “It was a totally different ball game,” he said. “A lot of the guys were much older than me and they weren’t exactly in football shape.”

During his time with the Marauders, the team played many teams out of Connecticut that showed fierce competition that Lussier didn’t believe his team was exactly ready for. “They had players that were 6’6 and 250 pounds,” he said. “There weren’t enough guys showing up to play for us, which was frustrating.”

In the fall of 2011, Franklin Piece announced that it was going to field a sprint football team beginning exactly one year later in 2012. Lussier was excited to hear the news, but since he was studying abroad in Vienna, he didn’t know if he could play fearing that he would miss tryouts.

Fortunately, some of Lussier’s fellow students, ones that he had played intramural football with, brought his name up to the head coach Peter Ewald and Lussier was immediately placed on the team roster before making it back from Vienna.

Playing sprint football at Franklin Pierce has turned out to be a very different experience for Lussier than playing in Keene for the Marauders. “This is much more difficult,” he said. “It’s much more time consuming, more disciplined and there is a much higher level of commitment.”

Lussier expressed that being elected captain by his teammates has been a great honor, saying that “it is pretty cool to say that I was the first captain elected for sprint football at Franklin Pierce and it is an experience I will never forget.”

Lussier has high hopes for the team after he graduates and he hopes that this season will leave the program with a good starting point for the future.

“I want to leave in November with a bettear reputation than we started,” he said. “It would be great to leave Franklin Pierce on good footing for the next three years to come.”