Mary Harrison, Campus Carrier sports editor

Fall 2022 marks the 10th season of Vikings football, and the program is commemorating its anniversary through a social media campaign and emphasized efforts to educate current players about Berry’s legacy on the gridiron.

Bernard Granville Jr. (17C), assistant coach for the defensive line and one of the first defensive tackles as a freshman in 2013, oversees the program’s “Year 10, Top 10 Tournament” on Twitter and Instagram. The campaign kicked off during players’ fall camp in August by highlighting 10 games from the            past 10 seasons. 

Starting with the season opener on Sept. 3, social media polls pit the games against each other in tournament-style matchups and ask Berry alumni and fans to vote for their favorite. The bracket challenge will run throughout the   regular season.

The “Top 10” games are considered the most impactful to Berry football or to have had dramatic finishes, including the first win against Washington University in 2014, the first win over a “Top 25” ranked opponent, the University of Chicago, in 2015, overtime wins     and championships.

The program’s first win also stands out to Head Coach Tony Kunczewski record because of the circumstances: an overtime victory on the 100th anniversary of Mountain Day, with over 6,600 fans in the stands to Kunczewski’s estimation, concluding with a pre-planned fireworks display.

“That’s a storybook way to win your first game,” Kunczewski said. “It’s tough to write a better script than that.”

A 2016 win against Centre College clinched the program’s first of five consecutive conference championships, a game that both Granville and Kunczewski mentioned as memorable because it was the last game of Berry football’s original freshman class.

“It’s not just the moments of the games,” Kunczewski said. “To have that senior class go out with a win was pretty special.”

Another featured win with historical significance to both Berry football and Berry College as an institution was the inaugural game in Valhalla Stadium in 2015, another overtime victory.

Chief of Staff Debbie Heida, who oversaw Berry athletics until summer 2022, said one of the promises the college made when starting the football program was that Berry would not go into debt to build a stadium. Rome’s Barron Stadium served as the Vikings home before Valhalla opened, with all the funds to build it being raised within three years, since it hired Kunczewski on as its first football staff in 2012.

“I think [Kunczewski] was Berry before he got to Berry,” Hedia said. “He loved this place from the start and really built something incredibly special.”

2012 is the same year Berry transitioned from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division III to be able to grow sports programs, a shift that Heida said has proved to be the right move. The athletic department has added nine sports programs in the past 15 years.

Hedia, who worked at colleges with football programs before coming to Berry, said that having football on campus increases the engagement of student athletes and increases campus vibrancy, especially at the start of the school year.

“It really has brought an energy and a pride,” Heida said. “None of us could have anticipated the level of success that we would reach as quickly as we did.”

A foundation for the program’s relatively rapid success on a conference level was laid by the grit of the first incoming classes, Kunczewski said, who faced a 2-17 record at the end of the program’s second season.

“We live in a society that wants to see instant gratification, and those guys didn’t see it for the first couple of years,” Kunczewski said.

Granville calls this grit an attitude of “complete buy-in” brought by the first players.

“My class decided to truly buckle down, take ownership of what goes right and what goes wrong in our program,” Granville said. “The [incoming] freshmen got to watch us work. Once we left, I think that standard was just kind of set, and it was held.” 

The success of Berry’s team is not confined to the gridiron. Over 10 years, Heida said, players have worked as general managers of student enterprises, resident assistants and lead actors. Heida said that positive leadership of players in other areas of student life was a stated goal of both hers and Kunczewski’s from the beginning, and something that Kunczewski said was crucial to building community support. 

“In his interview, I asked [Kunczewski], ‘How will you know that you have been successful in this D-III model of a football program, where the players are integrated into the life of the campus?’” Heida recalled. “And he said, ‘When I have a football player who’s the SGA president.’”

Tedric Palmer Jr., one of the program’s founding players, fulfilled that vision. His youngest brother Nick Palmer, a sophomore on the current team, continues to fulfill that vison as a Service and Leadership Fellows Scholar, member of the Berry Brotherhood and Athletes Bettering the Community and 2022 SOAR leader.

A third Palmer brother, Brandon, played from 2016 to 2019. Nick said that his brothers’ on-campus involvement and post-college success are part of a standard of excellence set by the first players and instilled by the program.

“[Coach Kunczewski] really advocates of us to be not just for football hardworking, but also off the field,” Nick said. “This Berry football program is bigger than what it says on paper.”

The 2021 season that broke the Vikings championship winning streak was a result of current players taking the team’s historic success for granted, Nick said, but the entire team committed to taking each game as a new opportunity to improve this season.

Kunczewski said that current players discovered it is difficult to guard against complacency from the top, and that is one reason why it is important to teach them about Berry football history and to build connections with program alumni, both of which the program emphasized during camp over the summer, a crucial time for establishing team culture.

“I think it’s important to educate our players on the history of the program,” Kunczewski said. “It’s important to keep that connection from the past to the present. In order to get to where you want to be, you’ve got to understand where you’ve been.”