Sam Benger was 5 years old when a flurry of health anomalies began to worry his parents. After one particularly late night, his father, Stu, began looking up his symptoms.

“You start doing the research online, and realize a lot of terrible things could be the cause,” Stu said.

Eventually, Stu and Sam’s mother, Beth, decided to drive Sam to to the Boston Children’s Hospital to run tests. Within hours, doctors diagnosed Sam with Type 1 diabetes.

“It was kind of scary,” Stu said. “I mean he was 5 (years old).”

Sam spent three days in the hospital, where the doctors ran more tests and began getting the family acclimated to what the rest of Sam’s life would entail. Daily blood sugar tests. Daily insulin shots. And if they failed to carefully monitor the condition, a very real possibility of death.

Doctors were quick to tell the family the negatives of the rest of Sam’s life, but nobody told them the positives.

Nobody told the family that Sam would become one of the most legendary football players in Hingham High School (Massachusetts) history. Nobody told them that he would eventually be one of the most decorated running backs in all of Division III football, running for over 3,600 career yards and setting multiple program records at Carnegie Mellon University.

But through battling his disease, Sam has realized that he doesn’t need other people to tell him what he can and can’t do. He can figure that out himself.

“Diabetes shouldn’t be a limiting factor in any way,” Sam said. “You grow to love challenges, because you know they’re events that will strengthen your character and who you are as a person.”

It took a while for the daily routine to catch on when Sam was first diagnosed. Since Sam’s pancreas doesn’t create its own insulin, when his blood sugar gets too low, he has to inject himself with insulin to raise his levels back to normal amounts.

A few years after the initial diagnosis, doctors transitioned Sam to an insulin pump. The pump automatically injected Sam with insulin, and although he still had to constantly monitor his blood sugar, it made the routine a little easier.

Sam also began playing football around the same time in second grade, with Stu as one of the assistant coaches. Stu said that he was initially worried about Sam getting injured, but his fears subsided when he saw how much potential Sam had.

“One of the other coaches came up as he was timing sprints, and he was like, ‘look at these times. He’s a whole second faster than anyone else,’” Stu said. “He was a legend here in youth football, and from day one you could just tell that he’s got it.”

Hingham is a hockey town, according to Stu, but everybody knew Sam the football player. By the time he was a junior in high school, he had received offers from multiple colleges, including a letter of interest from the staff at now-No. 3 Michigan, which he posted on his Twitter account.

“It shows you can do whatever you want to do with diabetes,” Stu said. “It’s one of the things he emphasizes to tell kids that are diagnosed — it doesn’t have to hold you back.”

Around the same time, Sam told his family that he had made the decision to be a college student, not a college athlete.

He began looking at Ivy League programs and small Division III programs with strong academics, and eventually got an offer from head coach Rich Lackner at CMU.

Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon Athletics

“I’ve been the head coach for 31 years,” Lackner said. “Those competitive juices that Sam has that he wakes up with every day are something he has day in and day out. He just does everything right all the time.”

With the new environment at CMU came new challenges with his diabetes. For the first time in his life, Sam was away from home and his family, the group of people that had supported him throughout his childhood.

Sam’s schedule also got tighter. Between classes, homework, practices and games, he said it sometimes was a struggle to find time to monitor his diabetes. Regardless, he has learned to be responsible over the years, and has adapted to life as a college athlete.

“It’s like, alright practice is over, I’ve got two or three hours of homework, what can I get in my system?” Sam said. “I’ve grown to really have good control over the diabetes, and it’s something that I think has definitely made me a better person.”

He said that careful nutrition is something that most players don’t have to take as seriously as he does, but also something that gives him an advantage over his competitors.

Sam was a first team Division III All-American last season, setting the CMU school records for single-season rushing yards, single season touchdowns, single-game rushing yards and single-season yards per game rushing. He has already rushed for 951 yards and 12 touchdowns this season.

Sam has developed the pedigree of a ball-hungry, hardworking player, Lackner said, and he refuses to let anything slow him down, even a life-threatening disease that doctors once told him would overshadow him for the rest of his life.

“Sam would never use his diabetic condition as a crutch, an excuse or anything of that nature,” Lackner said. “If you came here and didn’t know he was a diabetic, you would never know he was. He knows he has it, he deals with it, and he doesn’t let it hurt his performance at all.”

Published on October 19, 2016 at 5:01 pm

Contact Matt: mjfel100@syr.edu