Hennessey was in front lines of COVID-19 battle

Over the past dozen years, two former Eastern Washington University football players have gone to Italy to check out the world of European football.

There was Craig McIntyre who played at Eastern in 2004 and 2005, seasons where the Eagles won back-to-back Big Sky Conference championships and in a pair of postseason appearances.

His takeaway from the Italian Football League at the Parma Panthers: becoming part of the inspiration for novelist John Grisham’s book, “Playing for Pizza,” a book on life in Italian football.

Most recently, Reilly Hennessey, an EWU quarterback from 2015 and 2016, also landed in Parma. It’s a city of nearly 200,000 located in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna and famous for prosciutto ham.

Hennessey recently arrived back home in Camas, Wash. after being front-and-center to one of the hotbeds of the coronavirus outbreak — an experience that someday might be a book it its own right.

Hennessey landed in Cheney about the same time as walk-on Gage Gubrud, the Oregon kid who took the EWU football world by storm, leading the Eagles past Washington State in Pullman, 45-42 in his first start.

That essentially cemented Hennessey’s role as he walked the sidelines waiting for a chance. Like when he subbed for a struggling Gubrud in a 2016 game in Cheney vs. Northern Iowa and tossed the game winning touchdown to Beau Byus off a fake field goal in the final minute to beat the Panthers 34-30.

Hennessey transferred to Division II Central Washington for the 2017 and 2018 seasons and would lead the Wildcats to consecutive playoff appearances.

That’s where Italy dropped in his lap.

“It is the epitome of small world,” Hennessey said. As his senior year was coming to an end, “There were the occasional next level scouts coming through. But I always knew deep down that wasn’t really my destiny, my future.”

But then his phone started buzzing.

“Then, the end of November, all of a sudden, I get a text message from coach (Aaron) Best and he says, ‘Hey Reilly, I got a former player here that wants your contact information,’” about playing in Europe, Hennessey said.

While Hennessey had feelers from teams in Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Brazil, the idea of Italy was much more compelling.

“I knew that I had Italian roots and heritage and it’d be really cool place to explore and do that stuff,” he said. “Two months later I was on a plane to move across the world for six months and get to play some ball.”

Because of his roots, Hennessey was a sought-after commodity. He could be rostered as a dual-passport player, not counting towards the league’s rule of allowing just two Americans on the field at a time. It opened the way for Parma “To go get to just pure athletes,” Hennessey said.

Things did not go as planned for Hennessey as in the first game he broke his ring finger. Then, four weeks later after recovering, he broke it again. Parma still finished 6-2 and Hennessey looked forward to another shot.

He returned to Italy in January, just at COVID-19 was emerging. It became evident there was a problem when he went to the airport to pick up players and noticed, “‘Man, there’s all these people wearing masks, this is like Feb. 1,” Hennessey said. As of April 21, there were slightly more than 181,000 coronavirus cases and 24,000 deaths; in the U.S. those numbers stood at 808,000 and 44,000.

But the other thing Hennessey noticed was the difference in the culture. People there are packed into the city — Italy’s population density is 521 per square mile — and they commute out of town to go to work.

“Everybody in the U.S. lives out in the suburbs and then they commute into the city to go work,” Hennessey said. Population density here is 87 per square mile.

Hennessey arrived home in early April, COVID free, but hopes to return to Parma to recover the season that slipped away in 2021. In the meantime, he will complete the final piece of his secondary education degree, student teaching at his alma mater, Camas High and be ready to pursue real life in the classroom, armed with plenty of stories to tell.