Lafayette senior not ready to leave

It wouldn't have been as hard to see if he was a lousy football player. If he was a headcase on the field or a cancer in the locker room, maybe it would have been easier to deal with.

But Kenya Allen is a great football player, a great student, a great teammate and a great human being.

"He's just a tremendous person," Lafayette football coach Frank Tavani said. "He's the kind of kid you'd want as your own son."

And that's what makes it so tough to accept -- the fact that Kenya Allen will never again get to play the game he loves.

That's what happens when you've been hit so many times your brain turns to jelly. Four, five, six concussions, and any sane doctor knows its time to call it quits.

"You're a 21-year old kid in the MRI machine and that's a scary feeling," Allen remembered. "My family said they didn't want to push me around in a wheelchair the rest of my life."

In a game last season, Allen suffered his final concussion, the one that put him out for good.

"At that point, it was once concussion too many," Tavani explained. "He had problems for a while, had constant headaches. He intended to make a comeback [this season], but smarter heads prevailed and said it was time to call it a career."

So that's it. Three strong years as Lafayette's starting cornerback down the drain. So much for his athletic achievements, his long list of accolades. It's over.

Wrong. If your name is Kenya Allen, you don't know how to quit.

Allen will be back on that football field for his senior year, with his teammates and everyone he has grown to love. He'll be at the game Saturday when the Penn Quakers come to town.

Not as a player, but as a coach. A student assistant coach, working on a volunteer basis.

"I didn't want to leave [Lafayette] incomplete," Allen said. "I always said that I wanted to go the distance. Like a runner who pulls his hamstring, you want to get to that finish line."

His pads and his helmet might be missing, but he'll be there. And he'll be loving every minute of it.

"I'm trying to be a blessing to the younger guys," Allen said. "I want to give something back to the program because this program has given so much to me."

Before the injury bug hit, Allen had everything going for him.

He burst onto the scene his first year, becoming Lafayette's Defensive Rookie of the Year as well as the Patriot League Rookie of the Year.

His second year, Allen finished eighth in the Patriot League in pass breakups. The Princeton football team still has nightmares of the Leopards cornerback after Allen recorded 12 tackles (nine solo), two pass deflections and two blocked kicks against the Tigers in 1999.

Last season, Allen was recognized not just as an outstanding football player, but also as an outstanding student. The psychology major was one of just 21 student-athletes in the nation to be selected as an Arthur Ashe Jr. Sports Scholar First Team honoree. Allen was also named to the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll for the third straight year.

With these strong achievements, Allen is in the process of applying to be a Rhodes Scholar, which he said is a long shot.

But this model student isn't quite ready to wave goodbye to the team meetings, the long bus rides and the grueling practices.

He would have been a team leader as a four-year senior starter. Now, he'll be manning the sidelines as a secondary coach and an assistant to the defensive coordinator.

As his head coach explains, its tough to leave that football field for the last time, and that is why Allen has returned for his final year.

"You look at other sports and you have 40-plus basketball leagues, 80 softball games," Tavani said, "but flag football just doesn't do it. When you shed those pads for the last time, that's it. It takes time to get over it -- not returning to the gridiron."

Sometimes, though, the Lafayette senior yearns to be out there on the field, making that game-saving deflection or applying that crunching hit.

"I want to go out there and be a part of it," he said. "We're doing drills, and I want to get in there. You give anything to be back out there."

But Allen has also come to terms with his career-ending injury. In fact, he sometimes even thinks of it as a blessing.

"I'm getting ready to live my life," said Allen, who has plans to go into the consulting industry after graduation.

"I came to school for the academics. When you get a brain injury, football just isn't that important."

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