KYLE ROWLEY: Ex-Henricken star makes career of football, minus the NFL

By Bill Reynolds
The Providence Journal, RI

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, October 29, 2009

He has played arena football for teams in South Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Washington, New Hampshire, and Louisiana, and that’s just some of the places.

He just finished filming some scenes for the remake of the 1984 movie ``Red Dawn,” and is now living in Austin Texas, doing similar things for the hit television show ``Friday Night Lights” about to enter its third season.

Welcome to the wild football ride of Kyle Rowley, the former Hendricken star who quarterbacked Brown in 2001.

A wild ride that no one could have envisioned, not even him.

A ride through the underbelly of professional football in this country, one that’s taken him back and forth across the country, in big arenas and small ones, too; taken him from cheers and fun to uncertainty and doubt, a journey through what, in many ways, has become football’s minor leagues, coming soon to an arena near you.

Or you can have a football career without being in the NFL.

Kyle Rowley is proof.

And it’s one that’s happened almost by accident, one of those little twists of fate that changes everything.

For there he was back there in 2002 with a Brown degree in graphic arts, a stagnant economy, and now what?

``I’m a firm believer in doing what your passion is,” he says, ``and I always had been passionate about football.”

But what do you with football when you’re not good enough to play in the NFL, and your career has topped just when you’ve had the best season of your football life? What do you do with football when your college career is over and you still want to play?

He was working at a fitness place in Cranston when he got a call asking him if he was interested in trying out for an Arena League team at the Mohegan Sun.

That was the beginning.

He was around the team for a while, mostly insurance in case the quarterbacks got hurt, but that got him into the Arena football world. He’s been there ever since, an odyssey through the underbelly of professional football, this league that’s played in arenas where the game is speeded up, the fans are virtually on top of the players, and the quarterback is king.

His first team was one in Charleston, S. C. in Arena2, the developmental league for the Arena Football League, and since then he’s bounced around the country, have arm, will travel.

``I definitely have gotten some looks and opinion from people when they find out what I’ve been doing,” he says. ``Brown graduates aren’t supposed to be playing Arena football. Not for very long anyway. People like to put you in a box, make decisions what you should be doing.”

Rowley didn’t want to be in a box. He wanted to be in a huddle.

And he’s been in one ever since, most of the time in Arena2, but also with a stint with both the Philadelphia Soul and the Kansas City Brigade of the Arena Football League.

In 2008 he was the player of the year in Arena2 with the Arkansas Twisters, the same place he played last year.

``My game is more suited to arena football than it was to the outdoor game,” he says. ``I like to think of myself as a point guard with a football.”

But the actual playing is just part of Rowley’s football journey, or at least the way it’s evolving.

A contact from the arena league got him to Detroit where he recently finished working on a remake of the movie ``Red Dawn” one in which the late Patrick Swayze did in 1984, a movie about a group of American teenagers who join together to protect their hometown from invading Soviet solders in some futuristic World War III, calling themselves the ``Wolverines” after their high school mascot. He was there for three weeks, working 12 hour days, filming all night.

He’s called a ``stunt double,” Hollywood jargon for the guy who actually does real physical work, whether it’s jumping out a burning building, or in Rowley’s case, playing quarterback in some football scenes of the kids when they were in high school, part of the back story.

This is what he’s now doing in Texas, on the set of ``Friday Night Lights,” which begins its third season Thursday night. It’s the television series based on the hit book and movie of the same name, and is about a small Texas town and its obsession wit high school football.

Which means the football scenes have to be somewhat realistic, right?

That’s where Rowley comes in.

He is the ``stunt double” for an actor named Scott Peck who plays the high school quarterback, and the plan now is for him to be in Austin for the next six weeks or so for the filming of this season’s episodes.

``It’s great,” he says, ``because this is the arena league’s off-season, and I’m always looking for something to do in the off-season.”

One of the things he does is being involved in a new website with his two brothers, something called TonightinRI.com. that chronicles the state’s nightlife. He’s also looking for a place to play be in the spring, as the Arena League is in flux, a merging of the top arena teams with some of the ones in arena 2.

``I’d like to play for the next five to 10 years,” says Kyle Rowley. ``As long as my body holds up.”

For once a football player always a football player, right?

Even if it’s sometimes in Hollywood