Breaking Barriers, Inspiring Others: The Observant Jew who Walked Onto Division I College Football

‘At this point in my life, I’m just doing my best to accomplish my purpose. And, you know what: G-d, take the wheel,’ says Sam Salz.

By Jacob Gurvis, JTA

A couple hours before Shabbat one week ago, Sam Salz was in the parking lot of the Texas A&M Chabad, running practice football plays by himself.

Salz, the 5-foot-6 Orthodox player who made headlines in 2022 for walking onto the Division I Aggies, was in his third season with the team but had yet to appear in a game. Now, he was approaching the 10th game of a 12-game regular season in his final year, and still had not taken the field.

Saturday was senior night at Texas A&M, honoring the team’s outgoing players, and Salz’s father and a high school friend were in attendance, as were a group of Jewish friends from campus.

For Salz, it may have also been his last best chance to play. But as the game progressed into the final minutes, he was still waiting his turn.

With 42 seconds left, he heard his name called.

“All of a sudden I was standing there and I heard ‘Sam, Sam!’ and I was like, who is it?” Salz recounted in an interview. “It was my coach, and he was looking for me, like, ‘Come with me.’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the moment. I’m going to play.’”

Salz, who joined the Aggies as a running back and is now listed as a wide receiver, had not practiced a kickoff in quite some time. And, in fact, he had never played an official, organized football match of any kind.

In other words, this wasn’t just his first college football game. It was his first real game, period.

“The main thing that was going through my mind was, ‘You’re not going to false start or be offsides,’” Salz said, referring to two common penalties. “Even after they kicked it, I waited like a split second to see everybody else start moving, so then I started moving. Because I was like, I’m not going to be the one screwing this up.”

The main reason Salz had yet to take the field is that he is likely the only athlete among the approximately 77,000 NCAA football players who is an Orthodox, Shabbat-observant Jew. Traditional Shabbat observance forbids 39 different manners of work — from driving to carrying objects in public spaces — on Saturday, the day nearly all college football games are held.

Salz, of course, knew that going in, but went out for the team anyway. His appearance marked the culmination of a years-long journey, one that took him from Kohelet Yeshiva High School — a Modern Orthodox school in Philadelphia with roughly 100 students and no football team — to a legendary college football program that currently sits at No. 15 in the national rankings and plays in the vaunted Southeastern Conference.

“I was a kid who grew up in Philly attending Orthodox day schools my entire life, and ended up in the middle of Texas playing Division I football in the SEC,” Salz said. “At this point in my life, I’m just doing my best to accomplish my purpose. And, you know what: G-d, take the wheel.”

After last week’s game, he said, he is “very thankful,” calling the experience “just a very meaningful moment for me to be there and just get to run down.”

When he got to College Station, he began practicing on a patch of grass near the Aggies’ practice field, and boldly introduced himself to then-head coach Jimbo Fisher by saying, “I’m Sam Salz and I’m going to walk on to your football team.”

The hard work paid off: Salz joined the team as a sophomore walk-on, “Rudy”-style, in 2022. He chose jersey No. 39 in honor of those categories of work forbidden on Shabbat. While he has only played that one snap, he still contributes to the team by joining practices. He’s a member of the scout team, which acts as the opposing team to allow the Aggies to practice plays.

And the team has made arrangements to accommodate his Jewish observance, from exempting him from team travel and activities on Shabbat and other Jewish holidays to providing kosher food and his own kosher microwave in the team facility. During Passover last year, the Aggies even gave Salz his own water bottle to ensure that he was able to follow the holiday’s especially strict rules regarding kosher food.

Rabbi Yossi Lazaroff, the founder and director of Texas A&M’s Chabad, said Salz is an important role model for the Jewish community, which he estimated numbers in the “several hundreds” at the school of nearly 80,000 students.

“Sam is an upstander, and he tries to really make a difference,” Lazaroff said. “Every move that he was doing was like, ‘If I’m going to do it, then I need to do it properly. I can’t compromise. If I’m going to do it, No. 39, I’m not even going to go onto the field [on Shabbat]. I don’t want to have people even think that I’m compromising on my Jewish beliefs or halacha,’” the Hebrew term for Jewish law.

Lazaroff said Salz is an active member of the Chabad community, visiting the center daily for kosher meals, events and text study. During his freshman year, Salz even lived in a house next to the center that Chabad owns.

Salz said he cherishes the opportunity to teach his teammates about Judaism.

“People always ask questions. People are always curious about things,” Salz said. “They learn things about Judaism through me, and I take pride in that honestly, because especially when it comes down to Orthodox Judaism, it doesn’t tend to be represented in locker rooms that well.”

Some of the questions, Salz said, are expected: Why don’t you practice on certain days? How does kosher observance work? What’s that tree branch and lemon — a lulav and etrog — you’re walking around with during Sukkot? And what is Sukkot?

Others veer into the more personal and complex aspects of Jewish law, like questions about dating and sex. Even when his teammates think they’re joking around in the locker room, Salz said, there’s always a Jewish answer.

“As somebody who avidly studies the Talmud and Jewish law, I’ve heard a lot of the questions they’ll ask me,” Salz said, adding that he would tell them, “You’re joking about it, but there’s actually a debate about this in Jewish law.”

Moose Muhammad III, a fellow senior and wide receiver, told JTA that Salz has taught him about kosher laws and the schedule of Orthodox worship, which includes prayer thrice daily, and more on Shabbat and holidays.

“It’s been real cool, just because I feel like he’s all about the team, and he’s always trying to teach somebody,” Muhammad said. “He’s always just a positive influence on everybody, a good relationship to have.”

Muhammad said he remembers seeing Salz practicing on that patch of grass before he made the team, using trash cans as cones to run drills by himself. He said Salz’s work ethic is admirable.

“He comes out to work every single day,” he said. “Ever since then, since Jimbo [Fisher] brought him in, he’s just always been a good teammate and he’s had a positive presence.”

Salz has a Shabbat routine that allows him to catch the end of some contests after nightfall, when the day of rest ends: He spends Friday evening and Saturday mornings at Chabad. After afternoon prayers, he walks to the team’s facility for Seudah Shlishit, the customary third meal of Shabbat that occurs right before sundown. Depending on the time, he’ll either study text or sing Shabbat songs by himself in a spare room in the stadium. Then, time permitting, he dons his jersey and joins the team on the sideline.

Salz is part of a small cohort of Orthodox athletes whose stories have garnered attention in recent years, and he said he’s enjoyed talking to his contemporaries like Elie Kligman, a Sacramento State baseball player who was drafted into MLB in 2021. He’s also met Ryan Turell, the former Yeshiva University basketball star who now plays professionally in Israel.

Salz said he and Kligman have discussed launching a collective for Jewish college athletes to provide extra support when it comes to navigating the NCAA’s rules regarding benefitting from and promoting their brands and college careers.

He said the decision not to play on Shabbat is an easy one — even when the team’s wide receiver coach offered him a rare opportunity to travel with the team to Louisiana State University for a weekend game last season. But Salz said that doing that would have undercut the example he was trying to set.

“I’m here because I want to inspire people to keep Shabbat,” Salz said. “Without that, there’s not really a reason for [me] to be here, because it’s a very large part of my purpose of being here. So in that respect, I was like, I want to travel, but I can’t.”

Around campus, Salz said he often gets recognized as a local celebrity of sorts. He called Texas A&M “the most philosemitic campus you’ll probably get in the United States,” and said he hasn’t faced any antisemitism or discrimination, either before or after Oct. 7, 2023. Instead, peers often know his story and occasionally ask for selfies or autographs.

“I love having people who appreciate me, and I think I appreciate them more than they probably appreciate me,” Salz said. “I enjoy it. I feel honored, honestly, when someone comes up and they want to take a picture.”

Salz said his focus on empowering other Jewish people and athletes won’t end when he graduates college next year. He has plans to get ordained as a rabbi, be a motivational speaker — and hopefully make it to the NFL.

“There’s probably a Jewish kid, and maybe even especially an Orthodox kid, who wants to play football, or wants to play sports, and is sitting somewhere confused about what he should do, or who’s told that he’ll never be able to do it,” Salz said. “Even getting to see me run down on that field, successful play or not, could have given him all the hope that he wanted.”