Brookville’s Josh Eadie determined to make Virginia Tech’s fall roster

“You’re 5-foot nothin’, 100 and nothin’, and you have barely a speck of athletic ability. And you hung in there with the best college football players in the land for two years.” — Fortune, Notre Dame Stadium janitor, to Rudy Ruettiger in the movie “Rudy.”

BLACKSBURG — Josh Eadie is 6-foot-5 and weighs 230 pounds, and there doesn’t seem to be an athletic activity in which he couldn’t excel. In that regard, the Virginia Tech junior is the anti-Rudy Ruettiger, the 1974 Notre Dame walk-on who inspired a major motion picture.

However, their stories are actually quite similar.

Eadie, who recently won a walk-on tryout at Tech and is currently participating in drills as a defensive end with the Hokies this spring practice, would love for his journey to end like Rudy’s.

The Brookville grad beat out 34 other players for a spot on the scout team this spring. He’ll use the opportunity to try to convince Tech’s coaches his worthiness of retaining a roster spot in the fall.

“I really wouldn’t want to play for anybody but Tech, and now that I have the chance, it’s pretty awesome,” said Eadie, who was recruited out of high school by Ivy League schools Harvard and Yale.

Eadie has one thing Rudy — who at 5-7 and 165 pounds dressed and played for the Fighting Irish in their 1975 season-finale and famously sacked Georgia Tech quarterback Rudy Allen on the last play — did not: He’s extremely gifted athletically.

“Even if he wasn’t playing football, he was going to be in shape,” Brookville football coach Jeff Woody said. “He swam in high school. He played baseball in high school. He’s a great athlete, and he’s got a great head on his shoulders.”

Eadie tried out for the Hokies once before in 2006, but was unsuccessful. He weighed 190 pounds then when he attempted to walk on as a long snapper and special teams contributor.

His purpose for attending Tech wasn’t football, however. He wanted to play, but his main motivation was school. After finishing in the top 10 in his class at Brookville, he enrolled at Tech as an architecture major and later made the transition to industrial design.

His schedule is stacked with classes, and for a while he found it hard to make time to work out.

He took a year off from lifting and shrank to 185 pounds, 10 pounds lighter than his playing weight at Brookville, where he played tight end, defensive end and running back.

When last summer came around, he vowed to get back in shape. He started lifting heavy weights again, and continued through the fall. He also started sprint training.

He packed on 30 pounds in the summer and managed to maintain his speed.

“When I came into the (Tech football) weight room the first couple of periods (a couple weeks ago), I was a little bit further behind than some of the other guys that are at comparable positions, but they’ve been in the system for a couple of years, and I can attribute it to that,” Eadie said. “But as far as anything else, I feel like I came in on a pretty even level.”

Football has put a bit of a crimp in Eadie’s academic schedule, but he is still on pace to finish what is normally a five-year program in four.

He says his professors have worked with him to allow him to follow his dream.

“It’s pretty hectic … because my major is pretty intensive on time and class schedule, and I’ve had to make some sacrifices there and kind of go around my existing schedule and haven’t had much time for anything but football, class, sleeping and eating,” Eadie said.

Eadie has crunched the numbers and knows he’s a longshot to be invited back in the fall. He’s realistic to know that his time as a Virginia Tech football player could end at any moment.

But he maintains his goal to play for the Hokies.

“A coach broke it down for me. There are 103 players on the active roster plus me, the walk-on, brings it to 104. They’re bringing in 29 recruits, which brings it to 133, and they can only carry 120, so out of those people they have to cut 13, so the odds are against me being a non-scholarship walk-on player,” he said.

“I guess the only pros they have in me is I wouldn’t have to redshirt. They could redshirt other people and I’d give them depth. At the same time, I need to prove my meaningfulness.”

Eadie has the confidence of his parents, Gay and Jim Eadie. They’ve rarely seen their son fail in anything he’s done, so why would this be any different?

“He has a passion for it. He usually decides something that he really wants to do and then decides what he has to do to get there and then, if there’s any way possible, he’s going to do it,” his mother said.

Jim Eadie graduated from Tech in 1970 and played for the Hokies’ freshman baseball team. By his count, he’s been a season ticket holder at Lane Stadium for the last 15 years.

He and his wife will be in the crowd on April 25 cheering on their son, provided he’s still on the team. And they’re holding out hope of seeing their son run out of the Lane Stadium tunnel for a regular-season game this season.

They can picture it now, all the way down to the crowd chanting, “Ea-die, Ea-die, Ea-die …”