From Sunday to Sammy, Ikegwuonu Family Leaving Their Mark on Lackawanna Football

This would have been around 14 years ago. Sunday Ikegwuonu was standing on the sidelines at a field in Lackawanna, watching his older son, Sunday Jr., taking part in a Little Loop football game.

Sunday realized that his other little boy, 4-year-old Sam, was crying his eyes out. “Why are you crying,” he asked.

“Daddy,” Sam replied, “I want to play!”

Sam knew from the first time he touched a football that the game was for him. Soon, he was old enough for Little Loop, too, and he joined his older brother on a decade-long grid odyssey that brought them to the same defensive line at Lackawanna High School.

Over the years, Ikegwuonu grew as a player and person, and boy did he grow. By his senior season, Sam was a 6-foot-5, 330-pound defensive tackle, a nimble giant and— to use his head coach’s words — “unstoppable force” on a Steelers team that went 9-1 and came within a game of a sectional final.

Early this month, Sam was awarded the Trench Trophy, given annually to the top high school lineman in Western New York. The award dates back to 2003, and has been won most recently by Marcus Harrison and Rashard Perry, who both went on to Power 5 schools at Georgia and Syracuse, respectively.

Ikegwuonu also has earned an invitation to the Tiki Bowl, a high school all-star event in Honolulu. He’s believed to be the only New Yorker represented. In Saturday’s game, he’ll have a chance to show the big-time college scouts that he’s worthy of the same attention that Perry and Harrison attracted before him.

“Yeah, that’s the goal,” Ikegwuonu said early this week at the high school. “I’m not surprised, seeing my brother didn’t go DI (Sunday, a Trench finalist in ’22, is at Edinboro). Being from Western New York, we don’t get highly recruited.”

The University at Buffalo is said to be interested. Sam said Syracuse has spoken with him. Steelers head coach Marcus Rivers has told him Pittsburgh is a possibility. But the one solid option at the moment is Edinboro (Pa).University, a Division II program where his brother was a redshirt freshman this season.

Ikegwuonu was a bit of a late bloomer, a gifted athlete who needed to be prodded into the weight room in his first two seasons. He said some colleges were concerned with his grades, though he’s a B student. Western New York tends to be under-recruited. But Rivers said Sam belongs in Division I.

“Oh, of course,” Rivers said. “It’s a shocker. I would think all these Division I schools in the surrounding states would take him, because he’s a man-child. He’s different. If you put it on tape, he’s demanding double-teams and triple-teams and he’s getting through them like a knife through sliced bread.”

Rivers told Ikegwuonu that the Tiki Bowl would provide a national stage, a chance to perform in person, rather than on grainy game tapes against weak opponents, and show the major college scouts what they’ve been missing.

“Definitely,” said Rivers, a 2007 Lackawanna graduate who went on to be a top  receiver at UB. ‘The ball is in his court. I told him to go down there and dominate and put the City of Lackawanna and Western New York on the map and let people know that New York still has football. We’re not just a basketball state, we’re a football state as well.”

Ikegwuonu plays center on the Lackawanna basketball team, and is a thrower and occasional sprinter on the track squad. He’s a competitive soul who had the typically combative relationship with his older brother when they were kids. But as a younger player at Lackawanna, his physical commitment was lacking.

“Yeah, I didn’t touch the weight room at all,” he said. “I don’t know, just the stress of being in there, being all sweaty. I just didn’t like it, but as the years went on I got closer to it. Now, I’m in there more often. “Ever since we were little, me and my brother, I wanted to be better than him. After we lost his senior year, I said, got to be better. That was the goal.”

Lackawanna lost in the state Class C semifinals in Sunday Ikegwuonu’s senior year. Rivers, who had been an assistant, took over as head coach when Adam Tardiff retired in 2023. The Steelers had graduated 16 seniors from the state semifinalists. Rivers told Sam it was time for the juniors to be leaders.

“I told Sam, ‘You have to grow up’,” Rivers recalled. “A lot of childish kids will come to you and complain about running. You have to embrace the game, you have to love it. If I make you guys run 10 100’s, you have to go, ‘Coach, two more. Your teammates are going to hate you, but you have to be more loyal to the game than to your friends.”

Sam took the advice to heart. He blossomed as a player and leader, willing to speak out when the younger guys were slacking. He embraced the weight room, too. He would look in the mirror, see his expanding biceps, and be pleased.

“He’s definitely a leader in football and basketball,” said his father, Sunday. “I’m proud of everything he does. Sometimes he’s a little hot-headed, oh yeah. He does everything. Anything he puts his mind to, he will do it 110 percent.”

The Steelers haven’t matched what the 2022 team did in his brother’s final season. In each of the last two years, Lackawanna coasted into the sectionals with an unbeaten record, only to get knocked off short of the stadium. This year, they lost, 40-6, to Health Sciences, after allowing 12 points a game before that.

Ikegwuonu said some of his teammates played with a “kids mentality” against Health Sciences. Rivers agreed that his team hadn’t been ready and was a little complacent. Anyway, Sam has larger objectives now. On Wednesday, he and his mother, Dalene, flew to Hawaii for the four-day Tiki Bowl experience.

Dalene, a health liaison, raised money for Sam’s trip on a GoFundMe page. In fact, she did so well she had enough money for a second person to go. As always, she was an inspiration to Ikegwuonu, who worked and raised her two boys despite the challenge of being deaf.

“She goes with it,” Sam said. “That’s why I love her so much. She has so much fight in her, I keep her with me at all times. That’s my heart.”

Dalene is from Utah. Sunday is a native Nigerian. They met in South Korea through a dating site when he was in the military 20 years ago. Eventually, they got married and moved to Lackawanna, where Sunday is an assistant supervisor at a manufacturing firm.

Their dream — and Sam’s — is to see one of their boys make it to the NFL some day. Sunday’s boy playing on Sundays. Rivers can only lament that there will be no more Ikegwuonus playing football on Saturdays in Lackawanna.

“They’re very involved, the two parents you want your kids to have,” Rivers said. “I asked them, ‘Why couldn’t you guys have at least four more boys?’”