Background: Yale’s leading receiver was all-state at Mullen High School in 2000, but that didn’t mean much to college recruiters who could not overlook his lack of size and 4.6 speed in the 40-yard dash. He wanted to attend San Diego, but the I-AA school took one look at the tape he sent his senior year and said it wouldn’t recruit him. However, Henley’s 1,220 SAT and 3.75 GPA attracted Ivy League coaches who said he was close on grades. Columbia recommended he go to a prep school in New England. “At first I said no way,” Henley said Wednesday from New Haven, Conn. “I don’t want to go back to high school. All my friends were going to college.” But he looked into it and saw the advantages. He went to Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn., where he blossomed into the New England prep school player of the year.
Stat line: The 6-foot-1, 195-pound senior leads Yale and is seventh in the Ivy League with 31 catches for 422 yards and a touchdown. Of his 31 catches, 26 have gone for a touchdown or a first down.
What’s up: He is a bona fide Ivy League star. In 2003 he made Yale’s play of the year with an acrobatic TD catch with no time left in regulation to send the Princeton game into overtime, and two years ago he caught a pass every game and topped 100 yards in three. What happened to the guy no one wanted? “Part of it was at Mullen we had a great coach,” Henley said. “Butch Johnson was our receivers coach and I was surrounded by guys more athletically gifted than me. But I was very coachable. I really soaked up everything he said. As my body got bigger and faster and stronger and I realized I wanted to play, my work ethic got better.”
What’s next: Yale (6-1, 4-0 league) is in first place and chasing its first Ivy title since 1999. It visits Brown (3-4, 2-2) on Saturday at 10 a.m. MST.
Henderson’s take: As a closet Ivy League football fan, I love stories like Henley’s, particularly his attitude about Ivy League football. It has taken heat from academics who say an overemphasis on winning has dropped the overall SAT scores and GPAs of Ivy League schools. He said even his girlfriend, the captain of Yale’s soccer team, confronted a woman in her class who snickered at her wearing a Yale soccer shirt. “Why is selling tickets and making exposure for the school a bad thing?” said Henley who wants to go into commercial real estate or commercial insurance next year. “If Yale is what it claims to be, if everybody here is great, then they’re here because they’re great at something. Why should we let our athletics be mediocre when the Yale Symphony Orchestra is great and our improv groups are great?”
