Express Purpose
Playing beneath the radar, the CNY Express punts, passes and kicks toward national gridiron glory

It's not for the money. Players and coaches for the semipro CNY Express football team don't get paid and most of them don't even use the term semipro anyway. The official label is "amateur adult minor league" and their affiliation is the New York Amateur Football League (NYAFL).
But with the lights on in the stadium for an evening game, friends in the stands and a tradition of being nationally competitive, to the schoolteachers, factory workers, firefighters, construction workers and salespeople on the Express roster, it feels like semipro.
So it's not for the money.
"When you're playing it, you can't see it," recalls Ray Seals, now approaching his second year as defensive coordinator for the Fowler High School football team. In 1987, after playing for Henninger High School and spending some time in Florida, Seals was on his way to Hudson Valley Community College when he stopped off to visit friends who were getting ready for a season with the Express. He remembers he started to practice, "had a couple of good games," and wound up with a national minor-league championship. The team had already won the title in 1985, its second season, and they finished as the country's top minor-league football team again in 2004.
"I thought I was in the pros then," says Seals, who parlayed that championship season into a 10-year career in the National Football League. "Now, after being in the pros, I can see how hard it is to be committed {to a season with the Express}. They've got jobs. They've got lives outside of football. And they don't get paid."
Not only is it not about the money, players are required to pay a $100 registration fee or find a sponsor to pony up the dues. Players must also provide a photo ID and a health insurance card to suit up and must have completed 10 hours of community service before the first game. They must also invest in the suiting up by supplying their own shoulder pads, footwear and black helmet. Express management, headed by general manager Chris Gorman, supplies a logo for the helmets, game uniforms and transportation to away games.
They say it's for the love of the game, but while nobody talks much about it, it's partly about a dream. Seals' NFL tenure, including a 1996 trip to a Super Bowl, exists in mythical proportions on the minor-league circuit. But it really happened.
"There's a big difference now," says Seals, 40, assessing the chances of any current Express player to replicate his feat. "Then there was no Arena Football, no World Football League. The only thing then was the NFL and Canada {the Canadian Football League}. Now they have several levels. But you never know."
That myth will hover over Liverpool High School's football field at 7 p.m. on Saturday, July 9, when the 2005 CNY Express plays its home opener, one of 11 games on the schedule. But the players will have added motivation this year: winning a second straight national championship. Although none of them seem to be taking it for granted, with virtually the entire team returning from last year's drive to the top, they appear calmly confident that a repeat is more than possible.
First Down While mythical in scope, Seals' jump from the Express to running with the big dogs took some perseverance. "Back in high school I had a substitute teacher named Joe Riccardi," Seals says. "He was friends with Ray Perkins, who was then coach at the University of Alabama. He encouraged me to visit and my grandmother paid for me to fly down. I was impressed, but after I finished playing at Henninger, I moved to Florida with my mother. But I stayed in touch with Joe Riccardi and when I was playing with the Express he said I should be trying to connect with an NFL team."
Seals was hesitant. The NFL players strike was on that year, 1987. "If I got a shot {as a replacement player}," he says, "I didn't want to get blackballed when the {striking} players came back." Riccardi persisted and together they called the New York Giants and the New York Jets. "We were getting hung up on," Seals says. "People were saying, 'No college? No way!,' and then Joe called Ray Perkins who was coaching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, telling him I was the next Cornelius Bennett," a former defensive line all-star for the Buffalo Bills.
Perkins flew Seals down to Tampa, but left the field in the middle of his tryout. "I thought I must have messed up," Seals says. "But he came back out after it was over and said, 'We're going to sign you for next year. Go home and finish your semipro season and report to camp in February.' I played six years there."
In 1993 he signed as a free agent with the Pittsburgh Steelers, which played all the way to the conference championship game in 1994 and lost the Super Bowl in the last minute to the Dallas Cowboys the following year. Sidelined by an injury the following year, Seals finished his career with the Carolina Panthers in 1997.
Seals now has renewed dreams of an NFL connection. He recently took a dozen of his Fowler players to the Buffalo Bills summer camp and was pleasantly surprised to see so many people from his playing days now in NFL coaching or general manager positions.
For Chris Bresnahan, the Express quarterback, it's no longer about the dream. After toiling with the Sherman Park junior pee-wees, Pop Warner, Corcoran High School and the University of New Hampshire, in 1997 "Brezh," as his teammates call him, signed with the New England Patriots and lasted almost until the final cuts. After trying to catch on with a couple of other NFL teams, Bresnahan came home to play one game, a national championship playoff, with the old Syracuse Storm.
He moved to Florida and played parts of two seasons with the Arena League Tampa Bay Storm. After two years with the old Syracuse Vipers, he took a year off and signed on with the Express last year, throwing three touchdown passes in the team's national championship victory and being named first team all-America by the Minor League Football News. According to Bresnahan, the dream doesn't die from the physical wear and tear of the football grind.
"It's the business aspect of it," he says. "People have no idea how difficult it actually is to get to that level. I hate to crush anybody's dreams, but you're not going to be some guy on the street playing football and then find yourself on an NFL team. I'm sure there are guys who are out there {who still harbor the dream}, but you've got to have the time, 100 percent, and the connections. There are some very, very good football players that aren't in the NFL right now because they didn't know the right people."
Bresnahan says he and his teammates knew they could be nationally competitive when the season opened last year. They had won the NYAFL championship the year before without a consistent passing game. Last year they lost the league championship game to the Buffalo Gladiators, but advanced through the three-game Harvest Bowl Tournament and on to Homestead, Fla., on Jan. 9, where they beat the Detroit Seminoles, 44-31, to become national champs with a 15-1 record. Bresnahan attributes the success, in part, to Syracuse now fielding only one minor-league team.
"A lot of these guys I played with on the Vipers," he says, referring to this year's teammates. "We were competing for talent then with the CNY Express." Approaching this season--which opened June 18 at the Alex Duffy Fairgrounds in Watertown with a 28-12 victory over traditional rival Watertown Red and Black, the oldest minor-league football team in the country--Bresnahan does not expect to lose a game. The Express won their second game of the season, as well, a 55-12 trouncing of the Southern Tier Green Machine on June 25. "Wherever that takes us," he says calmly, "that'll take us."
Extra Point Express practices are held twice a week at Roosevelt Field at Midland and Brighton avenues, and with jobs and family responsibilities, many of the 46 players listed on the current roster have a hard time making them all. Evening deejay Big Smoothie on WAQX-FM 95.7 (95X) and Express center Jamie Hantke are lucky to make any. A second-team Minor League Football News all-America last year, Hantke says it's difficult keeping pace without participating in the team's regimen. "But I compensate by doing boot camp {a local fitness center routine} three days a week at 6 a.m. And I'm constantly talking to Brezh and the guys about what we need to be doing."
Bresnahan credits Hantke as one of the reasons he's still walking entering his 20th year in football and Hantke returns the compliment, saying Bresnahan's contribution to last year's success was huge. "The year before we won the league championship with only a running game," Hantke notes, "one guy running over 2,000 yards. But we didn't have the quarterback who could pass on a national championship level."
Hantke is hoping for a repeat of last year's success. "The whole team is just looking for respect for minor-league football," says the 26-year-old who is entering his seventh season with the Express.
The question of respect arose last year when the team's Homestead victory garnered front-page coverage in Binghamton's Press and Sun Bulletin but hardly a mention in the local sports pages. "What's up with that?" Express second year coach David Johnson asks playfully. "I coached in Binghamton for 24 years. I was the head coach in the high school. I also coached the semipro team there and developed a good rapport with a reporter there. A lot of people didn't even know I was coaching here.
"I had taken a year off to watch my son play at {SUNY} Brockport, and Scott Irons, who had played for me in Binghamton, told me they had talent here but coaching was lacking. Initially there was a learning curve, but it seems like a perfect fit and I've never coached a better bunch of guys. When we won the Harvest Bowl they started doing a story in Binghamton." Ironically, publication coincided with the Express winning the national championship, but still no press from The Post-Standard.
Johnson still lives in Binghamton, but began work as a treatment team leader at Hutchings Psychiatric Center in January. "This is the hardest level to coach because you're held captive by your players," he says. "You understand they're adults, they have families, they have full-time responsibilities, they have jobs, careers. They all do the best they can. We mandate that you get here one of the two practices a week and that's about all you can ask. We don't do a lot of hitting. If a player, God forbid, is going to get hurt I would rather it be in a game than in a practice. At this level guys have played the game. They know what they're doing. They have the skills. They have the techniques. You can hone them, but come Saturday night, they go out there and they know what they've got to do."
Johnson is blunt when asked if the players come to summer practices in shape. "No," he says with a chuckle. "Some do. A lot of guys do go to the gym. They work out. Physically, muscular-wise, they're in shape, but cardiovascular we need to do some training. That's my job as a coach. Conditioning last year was a big factor."
Injuries are also a factor, more so than at high levels of competition. "Injuries are big," he says, "because generally you have a starting nucleus and then you do drop off talent-wise into the second level. When you lose a starter it's key. We have guys here from 18 up to their 40s. They're here because of the love of the game. Their bodies endure a lot of pain. Last year when I took over there were many of them who were mid-30s up to early 40s. They said, 'Coach, we've been doing this for 12, 15 years, we want to win a national championship before we're too old to play.'"And it really, really is not for the money.

Walt Shepperd