Nicastro Marvels for Great Danes

Bob Ford Field isn’t Asgard, and Michael Nicastro is no superhero, but the Great Danes’ middle linebacker looks eerily similar to Marvel comic icon Thor. At five-feet-11 inches, Nicastro’s shoulder length blond hair and 210 pound frame could easily fill in for Chris Hemsworth if Stan Lee ever needed a stunt double.

Nicastro leads the Danes in tackles this season, and with a combination of strength and speed, it’s fair to say Nicastro could be Thor’s Hammer. Anything he can do to read a play before the snap, he does. From the quarterback licking his hands, to the running back looking towards the gap Nicastro is about to fill with his presence, Nicastro is always looking for an edge. After all, at his size, he’s not a prototypical linebacker, and he’ll be the first to admit he’s a small linebacker.

“I always try to look at the smaller linebackers,” Nicastro said. “It doesn’t matter who it is, I like to see how they play, because sometimes it’s harder. You can’t see much being a shorter linebacker.”

His grit and scrappiness is directly a product of the team he’s watched since he first followed football. His bedroom at his Albany apartment and his bedroom back home are both the iconic black-and-yellow of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Throughout the NFL, no franchise has produced better, more consistent linebacking corps than the team in the Steel City. From “Mean” Joe Green to Jack Lambert to James Harrison, Nicastro has had plenty of greatness to study.

Born the oldest of three boys to Maria and Glenn Nicastro, Michael was always getting shut down by his father whenever he inquired to play football. His dad, a former tight end at Ohio University and Cleveland Browns tryout, was always too worried that his son would get hurt or develop a head injury. It wasn’t until, through her excellent convincing skills, his mom opened his dad up to letting him play.

“My dad was a pretty good coach,” Mike said. “He taught me everything I know, up until college.”

In third grade, Mike got his first shot at football with the Columbia Ravens.

“Back then I was a fullback and linebacker,” he said laughing. “With a t-bone facemask, not knowing what to do.”

Mike’s dresser soon filled up with a trophy collection that he loved to show off. The bigger it got the more content he was, even if it meant borrowing a few from dad. Aside from the trophies, he collected McFarlane action figures of every football player he could get his hands on.

As Mike progressed each season, his father constantly convinced him the effort he would need to put into football. Games would get tougher, competition would get better, and talent alone wasn’t going to get young Mike everywhere he wanted to go.

“My dad always used to say, ‘your life is short so you have to love [football] to put all this hard work in’,” Mike recalled.

In high school, Mike made the transition to playing solely defense, being used as an outside linebacker, inside linebacker, and safety. Occasionally he’d take a few offensive snaps, but never for an extended period of time.

After his senior season at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School, Mike had his own doubts that he’d ever see the football field again. He wasn’t being recruited heavily by any large schools. He constantly heard the opportunities to walk-on or become part of a D-II or D-III program, but none of those truly captured his interests.

“I was scared I wasn’t going to play football after high school for a while,” Mike said. “Signing Day was February 1^st when I was in school; Albany didn’t contact me until December or January.”

It might’ve been his only D-I offer, but what really sold Nicastro on becoming a Great Dane has been the team motto for the past few seasons, “Purple Fam”.

“It felt like home,” Nicastro said. “When I visited, the whole UAlbany thing was ‘purple fam’ and it stood out to me that it held true. Even today, the older guys bring in the younger guys and no one looks down on anyone else. It’s all family oriented.”

Coming in as a freshman, it wasn’t a surprise that Nicastro barely saw the field. The first time he saw a depth chart, he was fourth on the list of outside linebackers. Following his first season, he heard over and over that it’d be tough for him to see the field with the amount of senior ahead of him. In a strange turn of events, injuries led to Mike seeing the field in his second year, and he’s held on to his spot tight ever since.

  This offseason, newly-hired head football coach Greg Gattuso named his pre-season captains, and Nicastro wasn’t one of them. Everything he ever heard growing up fueled a fire inside him to earn his way to being a captain.

“I knew I had to step it up a little bit,” he said. “It was definitely something I wanted. I had to start taking on more of a leadership role.”

Before the start of the season, Gattuso named Nicastro a captain, and his work ethic supports the decision. Nicastro loves watching film. Part of his pre-game ritual is making sure he gets a nap in, and watching film before every game. Every season Nicastro realizes that new recruits are brought in to replace the veterans. It’s up to the veterans to determine how soon they get replaced.

“I never feel like I’ve made it,” Nicastro said. “I’m always working to get to the next step. I have to get better, there’s always a next step to your game.”

The dream for Michael Nicastro is the same as any football player who lives, breathes, eats, and loves his sport. He wants to get that rare opportunity to play in the NFL. He can’t picture his life without football in it. If it all were to end tomorrow, he’d want to be a coach, or anything to stay close to the game.

He isn’t the best players in the CAA, but he’s one of Gattuso’s young stars, with an exponential amount of potential. With a large amount of freshman and sophomores in the starting lineup for the Danes, the ceiling has yet to be set. Nicastro is just another member of the Purple Fam trying to push that ceiling further and further upward. It isn’t going to happen overnight, but the change isn’t hard to see. The Danes were 1-11 last season, and are currently 6-3 this season, just their second year competing in the CAA, one of the FCS’ premier conferences.

With two more seasons left, Nicastro is expecting big things out of himself and his teammates.

“Individual honors are great,” Nicastro said. “But ultimately, I care more about what we accomplish as team.”