Utica College quarterback Andrew Benkwitt will spend most of Saturday listening to his favorite rap and hip-hop, just as he does before every night game.

Anything to calm his nerves.

“You just got to sit back and relax and wait for the time to come, because once 7 o’clock hits and the lights are on and everything, it’s a great atmosphere,” Benkwitt said.

But relaxing could be tougher this weekend. At 7 p.m. at Charles A. Gaetano Stadium, Benkwitt will lead Utica against the No. 14 Hobart. The overflowing crowd of about 4,000 fans will be nothing new, but Hobart headlines a revamped nonconference schedule engineered by head coach Blaise Faggiano to elevate his 10-year-old program to regional and national prominence.

Faggiano said he likes to schedule as many night games against as high of quality opponents as he can. He prefers New York heavyweights from the competitive Liberty League, like Hobart. The games are an opportunity to fight out recruiting battles on the field and draw big crowds.

Ultimately, Faggiano’s challenging nonconference schedule is meant to prepare Utica for a relentless season in one of the nation’s top D-III conferences, the Empire 8.

It was a tactic Faggiano’s mentor, the late Jim Butterfield, practiced regularly.

The college football hall of famer coached Faggiano and his Ithaca College teammates to a national championship in 1991. Faggiano returned to be an assistant coach under Butterfield in 1995 and stayed for four years.

In that time, Faggiano learned a lesson that he’s adopted as part of his own coaching philosophy.

“One of the things that Jim Butterfield would always say is that if you want to be good, you have to play good people,” Faggiano said.

Faggiano’s hiring in the winter of 2007 followed a 3-7 season in which the Pioneers played weak opponents in their first two nonconference games. Utica went 1-5 in conference play that season.

“We were playing under-par teams,” senior linebacker Genaro Scampone said. “The first three or four games out of conference, we were getting big wins and then we’d get into conference play, and it’d be a whole new ball game.

“Then this past year’s probably our hardest schedule Utica College has ever seen.”

Shortly after taking the job, though, Faggiano started to work on cornering the talent-rich Central New York region, which he estimated makes up about 40 percent of his roster.

The concentration of recruiting remolds the makeup of his squad, as well as local turnout.

“Utica always felt like home, and that was the icing on the cake, basically,” said Pat Carroll-Marsh, who was a standout at Liverpool High School. “Having people that I know in many local schools coming here and playing local schools, it just felt like the right thing for me.”

Utica is a program on the upswing, posting all-time best 5-5 records in consecutive seasons. The increasing attendances and higher-quality play on the field are byproducts of the changing culture.

The local matchups excite fans and motivate the players, too.

“We get the schedule before summer, so everyone takes a look at the schedule and, I mean, training for the summer, you look at how hard the schedule is and everybody just uses it,” Scampone said. “We’re playing this team; we’re playing this team; we need to be strong from the beginning of the season, all the way to the end, so it definitely motivates us in the offseason.”

The tough schedule challenges the players to perform at a high level in every game.

Benkwitt called this year’s team the best he’s been a part of in his career at Utica. The program let opportunities to vault itself into national recognition slip away last season. Against then-No. 25 Salisbury, Utica trailed by four late in the third quarter before the Seagulls ran out to a 70-45 final victory.

The Pioneers will remember the lessons they learned from that game in 2011 this weekend against Hobart.

“It’s not the best feeling in the world, but you got to deal with it,” Benkwitt said. “It’s adversity. You’re always going to face adversity in life. There’s adversity in every play of a football game. How you deal with it makes your team as good as they are.”

The Pioneers will be tested by another elite opponent on Saturday. But the challenge comes with an opportunity to pull the upset that has eluded the program in recent years.

“I think that everybody’s on the same page with that, you know, ‘Let’s knock the wind out of them. They have everything to lose,’” Benkwitt said.

Published on September 11, 2012 at 12:42 am

Contact Jacob: jmklinge@syr.edu | @Jacob_Klinger_