AMHERST — Whenever UMass arrives at its hotel for road games, Isaiah Rodgers makes sure he has the same roommate he’s had all season.
The senior cornerback could be paired with several of his more veteran teammates on these trips, but the coaches had other ideas for one of their most vocal and respected leaders. This year, Rodgers has bunked with freshman cornerback Josh Wallace, who has appeared in all seven games for the Minutemen thus far and started the past three opposite Rodgers. The pairing was designed to foster communication and a mentorship between the two, something that has benefited both players this season.
“Every question he asks me is ‘How do you do this? How do you do that,’” Rodgers said. “He just wants to learn, he’s young and he just wants to get better. In the film room, he’s mainly the one asking questions and out on the field he always has questions. There’s no bad questions, you can really see him growing and improving.”
The situation could have turned into a comedic movie plot with Wallace pestering Rodgers so much that neither person sleeps the night before the game. However, Wallace just laughed at that notion and said he uses the daylight to ask all of his questions so they can both focus on the game and rest up the night before.
“We do our tests and after that I usually just go to bed,” Wallace said. “We always talk about stuff on the field, and I’ll ask him little stuff, but we’re not up too late because we’ve got the game the next day.”
Wallace is one of several freshmen who have been thrust into starting roles sooner than coach Walt Bell or his staff would have preferred. In addition to being in his first year at UMass, Wallace is also in only his second year as a cornerback, having played the position for the first time last year as a senior at DeMatha Catholic outside of Washington, D.C.
Yet, the UMass defensive backfield has been so ravaged by injuries and player departures that there was little choice but turn to Wallace against Akron on Sept. 28 with only three healthy cornerbacks on the roster. There’s still a long way to go before he’s a shutdown corner like Rodgers, but things started to click for him two weeks ago against Louisiana Tech, when he had a career-best eight tackles while also forcing and recovering his first career fumble.
“He learns really well and he’s a guy that can handle failure and fail forward,” Bell said. “He’s played a lot of snaps probably well before he was ready to play physically or mentally, but he’s done a great job, he’s a really positive kid and he’s a guy that as this program grows, he’s going to be a huge part of why it grows in the direction we all want it to.”
Perhaps his biggest advantage entering UMass was his experience playing in pressure situations from his time at DeMatha. Wallace not only excelled for the Stags against a national schedule on the gridiron, he also earned basketball scholarship offers as the starting point guard on the nationally ranked basketball team. Although the physical skills of a point guard might not translate to football, Wallace said it definitely helped him in other ways on the football field.
“It helped me mentally because you’re more prepared,” Wallace said. “You’ve got to be prepared for anything (as a point guard), so it prepared me a lot being at that school.”
Although the Minutemen are as healthy as they’ve been in a long time, Wallace will probably still start opposite Rodgers on Saturday against UConn in a battle of 1-6 teams. Defensive coordinator and cornerbacks coach Aazaar Abdul-Rahim said he’s also been impressed with the maturity Wallace has shown about the learning process – a trait he credited to Wallace’s basketball background.
He said Wallace has the right attitude when it comes to his approach on game day and making sure he makes every snap count regardless of how it turns out for him.
“Experience is sometimes the best teacher, so I feel like each game whether he makes plays or whether he makes mistakes, he learns from it,” Abdul-Rahim said. “That’s one of his better qualities, he is very coachable.”
Josh Walfish can be reached at jwalfish@gazettenet.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshWalfishDHG. Get UMass coverage delivered in your Facebook news feed at www.facebook.com/GazetteUMassCoverage.