A Man Apart: Dante Balestracci Punishes Opponents, Shoulders Captain’s Burden

Out from the huddle steps a lone figure. He walks slowly towards midfield, staring straight ahead beyond the black and white stripes and into the eyes of his approaching opponents, his intensity palpable.

His advancing foes grasp one another’s hands and march cautiously towards him, presenting a united front while providing each other with strength to face the solitary form who comes into focus with each additional step.

They stop, the three or four men linked at their fingertips standing five yards apart from the one who crossed the field alone. The coin is tossed, the call made. The two sides shake hands and depart for their respective sidelines.

The posse that met him at midfield may have tried to overwhelm Harvard captain Dante Balestracci with sheer numbers before the game’s opening kickoff, but it is the multi-man delegation that slinks back to its own bench after getting its first taste of the oft-punned Inferno and the man who will be hurling them down into the dirt in only a few moments.

“I think it’s funny when a lot of guys come out real stone-faced and they try to intimidate you,” Balestracci says. “I’m not being cocky, but they’re not going to intimidate me.”

Inferno

With his team trailing by 20 late in the fourth quarter, Holy Cross’ senior wide receiver Ari Confesor—who had through three-and-a-half quarters plagued the Harvard secondary with his size and quickness, racking up more than 100 yards through the air—began a slant pattern over the middle of the field before quickly slipping into a hole in the Crimson coverage. Crusader quarterback Brian Schiller watched him the whole way and snapped a quick throw, cast perfectly in stride with his route.

As Confesor looked inside towards the ball, his eye latched on to a far more important development five yards beyond his objective’s path.

Dante.

Balestracci raced towards Confesor, his body squaring to deliver a knockout blow.

And so Confesor just stopped running. Like a deer in the headlights.

It wasn’t because Confesor was a coward—he’d taken his fair share of licks from the defensive backs during the game’s earlier moments. It was his fear of the Inferno.

Despite his team’s desperate circumstances, despite needing a first down to keep the chances of a Crusader victory alive, despite his own competitive edge, the potential reward earned by facing down Balestracci’s wrath simply wasn’t worth the pain Confesor was certain to experience.

Ballgame over.

* * *

“You have to love to hit to play linebacker, to enjoy playing football,” Balestracci says.

And when Balestracci hits, he hits hard. Every hit is designed to send a message, every tackle a warning not to even think about heading his way with a play call again.

“You’re going to hit that guy across from you as hard as you can every time,” Balestracci says. “You’re gong to let him know that you’re there and you’re not going anywhere, that you’re going to be there the whole game.”

But anyone can plant a hit. Balestracci can make an opponent feel it before it is ever even delivered.

“He tries to intimidate,” junior linebacker Bobby Everett says. “He’ll go out there and hit a guy face to face and try to drive him through the ground, which is how you have to do it. He punches at the ball and tries to get into the other guy’s head a little. When he makes a big hit for a loss, he’ll stand over the guy and let everyone know.”

Talk about a message that’s hard to miss.

With Balestracci, playing defense is just as much about making the hit as getting his opponent to fear the hit, to sense it coming and to panic and lose control of the situation.

Which helps the Crimson’s second leading tackler on the team’s all-time list do what he needs to be doing, as he did against Penn.

“Every time we hit their running back [Sam Mathews], we tried to drive him back, put him on his back,” Balestracci says. “We had to let him know that if you’re going to run the ball, we’re going to hit you hard and we’re going to hit you hard every single play, every time you touch the ball.”

So when the game’s intensity reached its fevered pitch in the fourth quarter, Mathews was primed to make a mistake.

And Balestracci was ready to elevate his game and deliver a final crushing blow. Punching and tearing at Mathews with the game on the line, he looked as though about to tear the helpless tailback to shreds. Not surprisingly, Mathews caved first.

Balestracci broke through into the offensive backfield and all of a sudden there was no place to turn.

Out pops the ball. In comes the Harvard offense.

Though the hits he will remember are not necessarily the biggest or flashiest or the ones that a fan could hear 30 yards away, that is not what matters to Balestracci.

“You just have to look at it as some plays are bigger than others,” he says. “It wasn’t even a tremendous hit or anything [when] we forced the fumble against Lafayette that completely turned the game around. We were sputtering on offense, we weren’t really doing much and on defense we were pretty iffy all game. While it wasn’t a great hit, I took a swipe at the ball, knocked it out, and the momentum of the game completely flipped around.”

And then there are those other plays, like one Balestracci delivered on Princeton running back Ryan Veach in the fourth quarter of the Crimson’s match-up with the Tigers.

Veach dominated Harvard’s defense, rushing for over 200 yards, and Balestracci—rage evident in his gait—seemed ready to boil over.

As Balestracci came across the field with Veach in his sights, there could be no mistaking what would happen next—Princeton’s running back snapped backwards upon receiving the crushing blow, ground into the dirt and wincing in pain at the hit he had just received while a still-unsatisfied Balestracci stood over him and waited for another chance to lay into him.

“The big hits get you excited,” Balestracci says. “[You] start jumping around, talking and stuff like that, but that’s just part of enjoying the game.”

And for Balestracci, so is delivering hits like the one that signaled the beginning of the end for Ryan Veach, who was ineffective for the remainder of that game.

Purgatorio

While Balestracci’s presence on the field has always signaled impending doom for opponents, his evolution from a high school senior splitting time between safety and quarterback into a menacing middle linebacker four years later along with the skills he has honed along the way have made him that much more potent a force to be reckoned with.

“I’ve gone from being the new kid, the young kid on the team as a freshman…When you’re 18, 19 coming out of high school and really playing with 22, 23 year old guys that are seniors, you are the kid,” Balestracci says. “That age difference is pretty big in terms of how physically and mentally mature you are. [I was] a kid who made plays and was fortunate to have some good guys around him right when he came in.”

One of the guys who mentored him was defensive tackle R. D. Kern ’01, who brought him up to speed on the pace of the college game.

“The big difference from high school to college football: the intensity level on every play is so high,” Balestracci says. In high school you can kind of take a few plays off here or there but in college you have to go 100 percent the whole time. You have to have your motor running the whole time at a very high level to even be average out there, let alone be successful. I think [Kern] taught me that right off the bat.”

But good fortune and helpful advice alone can’t account for the sort of success that Balestracci has enjoyed across his four years at Harvard.

“He played like a junior when he was a freshman,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy says. “He just had this natural poise and maturity that is not something you generally see in freshmen. Legitimately, it’s a big transition from high school to college and you’re throwing the football even before you start classes and the combination of those things can be overwhelming. In his case, he just hit the ground running and that’s the way it’s always been.”

Balestracci has thus far garnered three first team All-Ivy seasons—including becoming the first freshman in league history tabbed for the award—and three All-New England nods, and is well on his way to earning another of each. This is in addition to being selected as the Ancient Eight’s Rookie of the Year in 2000 and a finalist for the Buck Buchanan award last year, presented to the top defender in the nation.

If only everyone for Harvard could be as physically and mentally immature as its captain was as a freshman.

“I wasn’t always doing the right thing,” Balestracci says. “But it seemed like I always had a nose for the football and made plays.”

And while that may have been good enough for most everyone else, it wasn’t good enough for the only person who mattered—Balestracci himself.

“He was the top linebacker in the league his freshman year,” Everett says. “But he has constantly worked to get better and contribute more to the team. He wasn’t satisfied with success, and that’s the type of attitude good teams and good leaders need to have.”

But while the motivation was there, the keys to unlocking his full technical and athletic potential did not lie within. The work of two defensive coaches and the introduction of a strength-and-conditioning coach, however, unlocked the doors to Balestracci’s full potential.

“I think coach Bruce Tall, who was the linebacker coach-defensive coordinator the first two years I was here, made the transition for me from safety in high school to linebacker in college,” Balestracci says. “He taught me the nuances of film, just fundamental techniques like how to take blocks, how to get off blocks.”

And for a dominant player who had never crunched film before, taking that first step in watching game video made Balestracci that much more likely to be in the right place right off the snap, instead of sniffing the play out based on just his instincts.

“I came in having never watched game film,” Balestracci says. “[Now] I’ll bring back film and watch it at night just to be as prepared as I can be for the other team. When you line up on Saturday’s you can anticipate stuff and it makes it that much easier to be in that place.”

The summer after Tall’s departure, the introduction of a strength-and-conditioning coach took the skills Balestracci had honed during his first two years and made their implementation that much more deadly.

Balestracci matriculated at 230 pounds, solid and well-built but physically capable of maintaining a larger frame.

“We got a strength coach after my sophomore season and that was huge,” Balestracci says. “We were all in good shape, we were all getting stronger, but the gains we’ve made with the strength coach have been a lot bigger…twenty pounds later, I think I’m a lot faster than when I showed up.”

With the skills assembled and the body honed, a finishing polish was all that was left to be applied.

Linebacker coach John Butler was more than happy to provide the final touch-ups.

“Whereas I was doing pretty well my first three years, [Butler] came in this past off-season and sat down with me and said, ‘You do this well, you do that well, but if you improve yourself here you’re going to be that much better,’” Balestracci says. “‘You’re going to be that much more of a complete player.’ And we worked on pass-rush moves and trying to make the huge play instead of just making regular plays, on putting yourself in position to make those huge momentum changing plays.

“He’s brought me to that next level where I make very few mistakes and I play at a very high level and I’m making all the plays that I need to.”

Talk about an understatement.

Sure, he could have stopped progressing, stopped learning when he was at the top of the heap three seasons ago. But to do that would have been contrary to everything Balestracci has ever known.

“My parents instilled in [my brothers and me] that in everything you’re going to do, be the best at it,” Balestracci says. “If you’re going to do something you’re going to do it all the way. You’re not going to take shortcuts or anything like that.”

And while he’d never admit it—he’s far too humble—Balestracci has done just that in joining the canon of elite Crimson defenders. He’s gone from being good to the best in three years flat.

“Isaiah Kacyvenski [’00] is the best linebacker that ever played here,” Balestracci says. “He plays for the Seahawks now—there’s no doubt about that. To be mentioned with him, to be mentioned with the other guys like Aron Natale [‘00] and those guys that are up on the tackle list and when you see yourself and where you stand as compared to all the other guys that have come and played here and gone on—I feel honored to be a part of the tradition. I feel honored to be able to do what I’ve done for this program for this team.”

Paradiso

With his three years of solid starting experience and a firmly established role in the starting lineup, Balestracci was a fairly obvious choice as the 130th captain of the Harvard football team. Generally accepted as a defensive leader after three years, the award was less of a promotion and more an official recognition of responsibilities the New Bedford native already had placed upon him by his teammates.

“When I was a junior, I had still played more than some of the seniors, so I had a default leadership position,” Balestracci says.

One which clearly didn’t escape the eyes of both his teammates and his coaches.

“It is so obvious [a choice],” Murphy says. “It was probably the most lopsided vote we’ve had for captain because you get some really outstanding seniors on this football team. But it was just so obvious.”

And while the latest honor to be presented to an already well-decorated individual may have seemed like something of a foregone conclusion, Balestracci holds the position and the obligations it entails in the highest regard, particularly appreciative of the respect his teammates demonstrated in selecting him as their lone representative.

“Being one captain makes it that much more special, makes it that much more significant,” Balestracci says. “If you’re a quad-captain or a tri-captain, what does that mean? I think being the sole captain, being elected to be captain by your teammates and being that one guy is that much more special.”

Though not particularly vocal, especially once the team heads out onto the field, the presence Balestracci has both on the field and in the locker room ensures that though he may not always have the first word, he will generally have the last one.

“I’m not a really vocal, rah-rah type of guy,” Balestracci says. “But at the same time, if I need to get vocal and get people going it makes it that much more effective in that I don’t say a lot, I just play, so that when I am saying something everyone knows that something needs to be done, that I’m upset about something or that its something really important because I’m not always yelling for the sake of yelling.”

For the most part, though, Balestracci has always led by example—making the crucial tackle, forcing the critical fumble—and carrying himself with a quiet dignity and humility.

“I think the best example of what kind of leader he is is by example and performance,” Murphy says. “In terms of holding himself to the highest standard of anybody on the team, whether it’s off-season training, whether it’s watching the video, whether it’s having good character off the field. The combination of those things is what he considers and I consider the most appropriate form of leadership. And that is, ‘How do you lead?’ Not just what do you say, but how do you lead? And he does that extremely well.”

And while he possesses an intensity and level of focus on the field that few can claim to share, Balestracci makes a conscious effort not to be aloof from his teammates but to be as easy to talk to as he was prior to being selected as captain.

“I’ve had some captains that, through their sheer authority and wanting to make sure the team did well would almost distance themselves from their teammates just to make sure the team stayed focused and did what they had to do to be successful,” Murphy says. “I think Dante does a good job balancing being a captain and also being one of the guys.”

“From what I can see, nothing much has changed except that now he addresses us as a team from time to time,” Everett says. “As long as I’ve been here, he has consistently been one of the hardest workers and a lead-by-example guy.”

Though Balestracci has been successful in that regard, the road taken by this year’s Crimson squad has been arduous and the obstacles its captain has faced have been numerous. Injuries and the untimely defeats to which they contributed have made this season and its outcome—regardless of the result against Yale—far less successful than originally anticipated.

And though he isn’t the cause, that frustration has weighed particularly heavily on Balestracci’s shoulders.

“You feel more responsible for everything that’s going on with the team,” Balestracci says. “Whether it’s playing well or playing poorly or just like the day-to-day things. Good practices, bad practices, things like that.”

Keeping the team together and as strong as possible under the circumstances isn’t always easy. With two-deep players rotating in and out, the confidence level overall began to wane, but Balestracci has prevented the squad from losing heart.

“Basically at team meetings I’m saying, ‘It doesn’t matter who we have in there,’” Balestracci says. “Our backups are good. Our backups at other places would be starting. We have that much talent on our team. Talking to the guys, talking with guys like [QB] Garrett [Schires ‘05], talking with guys that are stepping up and filling in for all the injuries we’ve had this year and saying, ‘You’re as good as the guy you’re going to line up against, if not better, and you’re definitely going to get the job done.’”

And when they didn’t, when Dartmouth rolled into Harvard Stadium and upset the then-undefeated Crimson on its own turf, Balestracci was there to right the course.

“I basically said, ‘Defensively we’re not getting it done. We didn’t get it done against Lafayette, Princeton or Dartmouth,’” Balestracci says. “I really tried to get into people’s heads that we needed to have better practices, have more focus during practice, make more plays during practice.”

The defense surrendered just 16 points the next time out and would have given up only nine were it not for an untimely late-game interception.

But now the focus is not on the past, but on the final game of Balestracci’s collegiate career.

“It’s my last game at Harvard, it’s probably going to be the game that I remember this season by,” Balestracci says. “If we win at Yale, it makes it much easier to forget that we lost to Penn, that we lost to Columbia, that we lost to Dartmouth. You can say that we went out with a win, that we went out successful, and that’s really how you’re measured as a Harvard football player.”

* * *

And so, one last time, Dante Balestracci will step away from his teammates, huddled tightly behind him, and begin the walk across the field. One last time will he look his opponents in the eye as they stand opposite him. One last time will he be a man apart.

—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.