Two Playoff Teams, One Foot

Greg Orkiszewski has won a Long Island football title. The senior has played in a Suffolk championship game in soccer.

Greg Orkiszewski has won a Long Island football title. The Glenn senior has played in a Suffolk championship game in soccer.

And he hopes to do it all over again this month.

When top-seeded in a Suffolk Division IV football quarterfinal Saturday at 2 p.m., Orkiszewski will serve as the placekicker.

“He’s a very good kicker,” Glenn Football Coach Dave Shanahan said.

No. 3 Glenn travels to face No. 2 East Hampton in a Suffolk Class A boys soccer semifinal Monday at 2 p.m. Orkiszewski, a three-year starter, will be patrolling the defensive midfield. 

The Knights earned a playoff win the hard way Thursday in a soccer quarterfinal against Miller Place. Tied at 1, the teams went through two rounds of penalty kicks before Glenn advanced 9-8.

But it’s football where he’s raising eyebrows.

“Soccer I’ve done all my life,” said Orkiszewski, who has 4 goals and 8 assists and wants to play soccer at Cortland. “I still want to play. So that’s something I hope to do. But if football comes around it could change my mind.”

The 6-foot, 150-pound Orkiszewski has kicked a winning field goal. He’s run down and taken the ball away from talented goal scorers on the pitch. They are very different skill sets but bring the same adrenaline rush. And yet football has something more.

“Football is a completely different environment,” Orkiszewski said. “It’s crazy. That burst of energy people get on one play...”

He added: “JV there was a bad snap. I went to recover it. I ran, took a hit. Completely different from soccer.” 

What Shanahan sees his someone who is making invaluable contributions to two playoff runs – the ultimate team player. Take the 2010 game against Bayport-Blue Point. Orkiszewski played a soccer game against East Hampton in the morning. He arrived at the football game at halftime, just in time to be the deciding factor. He booted a field goal with 18 seconds to go to lift the Knights to a 9-7 win, a defining moment in Glenn’s 12-0 season.

Orkiszewski has nailed 39 extra point attempts this fall. He often booms kickoffs into the end zone. That’s a real edge on the high school level, swinging the field position battle decidedly in Glenn’s favor.

“He’s just scratching the surface of what he can do,” Shanahan said. “If he kicked football full time he’d be in the end zone every time.”

That’s two teams, one reliable foot.