SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Sam Assaf emerges from the Notre Dame lacrosse locker room just before noon on Saturday and takes a hard right toward the exit. The walk-on running back for the football team spent the past hour warming up for a game he never expected to play in, but Assaf wants to keep with routines, no matter how absurd they may seem to everyone else.

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A scout team lacrosse defender, Assaf pairs with defenseman Chris Fake in pregame, helping a starter for a national championship contender prep. Assaf simulates the attacker Fake will mark that afternoon against North Carolina. He picks up ground balls, works on fakes. And most weekends, that’s it for Assaf. He returns to the sidelines and watches that preparation go to work as Notre Dame lacrosse rolls through the regular season.

It’s just that this isn’t one of those days, which is why Assaf exits Arlotta Stadium just before opening face-off of what turns into a 16-9 win over North Carolina on senior day.

There’s a golf cart waiting for Assaf outside, with former Notre Dame receiver Amir Carlisle, now the program’s director of player development, at the wheel. A few former Notre Dame walk-ons spot Assaf before he hops on, pre-congratulating him on what’s supposed to come. Assaf boards with a bowl of Reese’s Puffs cereal mixed with Greek yogurt and protein powder. Then Carlisle hits the gas.

Sort of.

Golf carts being in demand on Blue-Gold Game weekend for recruits and donors, what’s left for a walk-on playing two sports falls down the transportation food chain. The cart sputters down Walton Lane through fans before turning right on Leahy Drive and then left on Moose Krause Circle toward Notre Dame Stadium. The commute lasts almost five minutes gate to gate, enough time for Assaf to wolf down those carbs and protein.

“Walking might have been faster,” he says with a laugh. “Hopefully the ushers believe that I’m on the team and let me in the gate.”

Irish Win!

Gold takes the Blue-Gold Game #Goirish☘️

— Notre Dame Football (@NDFootball) April 22, 2023

It’s a fair concern for the 6-foot-1, 200-pound athlete who has no expectation of playing in an actual Notre Dame football game. Assaf — older brother Mick was also a walk-on running back — transferred to Notre Dame in the spring semester two years ago after starting his lacrosse career at Division III Amherst. He didn’t play football there and walked on with Notre Dame as almost a joke.

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During one of his first practices, former offensive coordinator Tommy Rees threw Assaf out of a running backs drill because he didn’t know how to take a handoff. Now Assaf is heading toward Notre Dame Stadium with the expectation of real reps in a meaningful moment for the first time since the end of his high school lacrosse year at Pace Academy in Atlanta. All four of Assaf’s brothers are here to see it, along with both parents and one of his high school football coaches.

“Damn, this is my first time playing in a game that’s not end-of-the-game minutes since high school,” Assaf says. “That’s four years.”

Carlisle parks the cart by the north tunnel. Assaf exits. The ushers wave him through.

If Sam Assaf wonders how much he’ll play in the Blue-Gold Game, a clue comes late in the first quarter. It’s just that Assaf doesn’t know the play, tipping quarterback Sam Hartman that he’s in the dark after breaking the huddle. Hartman turns to the sideline and points at Assaf, then calls timeout, less an operational fault than the Gold team trying to run a trick play with a back who never practiced it.

“We only had one practice split up as teams, and I wasn’t there for it,” Assaf says. “Obviously (Gi’Bran) Payne took those reps.”

There’s not a lot Assaf can do about not knowing a play he never installed. He’d spent three weeks getting caught up on the basics of Notre Dame’s offense. Asking him to know exotics feels like a stretch, even for a guy with a 3.989 GPA, a major in economics with minors in data science and classical studies. Assaf says he got an A- in Great Speeches, the only thing holding him back from a 4.0.

Running backs coach Deland McCullough told Assaf there would be plenty of work on Saturday after Notre Dame practiced without Logan Diggs and Jadarian Price, then lost walk-on backs Chase Ketterer and Skip Velotta in early April. That made the running backs depth chart Audric Estime, Payne … and Assaf. By Easter weekend, Assaf was cramming Notre Dame’s entire spring install.

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“Way harder than any of my classes, and way more time consuming than any of my classes,” Assaf says. “Scout team, usually it’s like we’re in second grade, we get around the GA’s, they hold up a card and there’s literal lines telling us where to run. Now you have to lock in for plays, maybe you’re empty, stuff you never do with scout. It’s been a lot of studying.”

How Assaf finds the time isn’t exactly clear. A typical spring day can start at 5:30 a.m., with Assaf getting taped in the football training room 15 minutes later. Then breakfast and team meeting at 6:45 a.m. Practice starts at 8 a.m. and runs a couple of hours before Assaf is released to class. He’s back getting taped for lacrosse around 3 p.m., with practice ending at 6 p.m., followed by 45 minutes of film.

On days without practices, Assaf rotates team lifts and runs between football and lacrosse. All for the opportunity to not play in games. That leads to the question of why anyone would do this.

“I mean, if you grew up in a family like he did, sports is a big thing in their family,” says receiver Jayden Thomas, who also attended Pace Academy. “And Sam’s obviously athletic enough.”

That shows during the Blue-Gold Game as Assaf finishes with a game-high 14 carries for 42 yards. He gets drilled by mid-year linebacker Preston Zinter. He nearly breaks a big gain before freshman defensive end Aiden Gobaira cuts him down. More than once, full-speed contact with scholarship defenders leaves Assaf checking to make sure he’s still all there.

“Those live hits, those hurt for sure. Lot of big bodies falling on you,” Assaf says. “There was an inside zone where my knee and ankle twisted, and a lot of people landed on me. I thought it was all over. There’s a chance that happened a lot.”

Assaf has enough of the coaching staff’s attention that offensive coordinator Gerad Parker reminds him to keep his pads low after one carry. It’s not the kind of stuff coaches do to players who they’re just cycling through, even if would be easy to forget Assaf was part of the operation.

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After the game, Marcus Freeman is asked if doing away with the spring game might be a strategic move to consider. He’s at least open to the idea. Freeman also knows what moments like Saturday can mean to players like Assaf.

“Not everybody gets a chance to play in Notre Dame Stadium or will ever get the opportunity to play a meaningful game,” Freeman says. “It’s a great opportunity to give the guys you are counting on a chance to go out there and compete for a little bit, but also give the guys that might not ever step on that field in a meaningful game an opportunity to go out there and play in a real Notre Dame uniform in a spring game.”

Assaf falls into that second category, which makes the spring game a testimonial to work. And Freeman knows that. The head coach wrote a letter of recommendation for Assaf for a Master’s program in the Mendoza College of Business.

Assaf will start working on his next degree this fall.

Go inside the Notre Dame lacrosse locker room and there’s a quote attached to the wall after passing through the team room. It’s from Martin Luther King Jr., a call to take pride in work, no matter the job title.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all hosts of heaven and earth pause to say, ‘Here lives a great sweeper who did his job well.’”

For a program with nearly 60 players, it’s required reading. Especially when two of them are brothers Pat and Chris Kavanaugh, who have have combined for 51 goals and 47 assists this season. Both are candidates for the Tewaaraton Award, the Heisman Trophy of lacrosse. Point being, it’s not much easier to get on the field for Notre Dame lacrosse than it is for Notre Dame football, in which there are 85 scholarship athletes in front of you.

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For the lacrosse program to function — it’s doing just fine, ranked No. 1 nationally — players have to not only know their roles, they have to embrace them.

“Sam exemplifies that,” says lacrosse assistant coach Chris Wojcik. “He hasn’t played. He doesn’t get in games, but he really examples being a great teammate and trying to execute his role to the best of his ability.”

Wojcik is the offensive coordinator, which means he also organizes the prep team defense, the Gold squad that’s nicknamed Dijon. For Assaf, that means learning how opponents play defense first and learning how Notre Dame actually does it second. It also means trying to defend the Kavanaugh brothers. That part rarely goes well.

“Kind of similar trying to block Isaiah Foskey. I don’t know what you want me to do here coach, his arms are 3-feet long, and he can bench 225 a lot more times than I can,” Assaf says. “Or it’s comparable to when we had Kyle (Hamilton). I’ll run a rail route, but I’m not running by Kyle.”

Assaf still keeps showing up, not to get onto the field but because he’s addicted to competition. Just like when Assaf texted McCullough after that rash of running backs injuries asking if football needed more from him, he’ll pick Wojcik’s brain on every detail of an opponent’s defense, whether that’s Duke, Virginia or North Carolina. Assaf just wants to know. And he’ll keeping asking until he does.

“He’s the guy who shows up to office hours with a list of 30 questions. Not because he wants a better grade, but because he actually wants to know,” says father Fred Assaf. “The rest of the family are like, ‘dude, this is crazy.’ And Sam is like, ‘I don’t know what to do on my day off.’”

Eventually, Assaf will have a few more of those. As a graduate student, he plans to keep up this routine in the fall, splitting time between football and lacrosse. But next spring he’ll be down to just one, no more winter workouts, no more spring football. Maybe he’ll get into a few more lacrosse games after playing in just one last season. But that’s not really the point. He just wants to wring every drop from his Notre Dame experience.

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“I love to push myself and try to do the most I can and make things better,” he says. “I don’t want to finish college with any regrets or, ‘Man, I could have played more if I tried harder.’”

As the Blue-Gold Game ends, Assaf mixes with Estime and Payne, laughing about how the walk-on who’d never played running back in high school was part of the room in full. Assaf appreciates the moment, both because he got to play and because he better understands what it was like to be Estime, at least for one afternoon in April.

Before leaving the field, Assaf finds his dad and gets a picture to commemorate the afternoon. For most, the spring game may be remembered for the quarterback competition or the freshman receivers. For Sam Assaf, it will be remembered for something else. As the players head toward the locker room, Assaf takes his time walking up the tunnel. He’s the last player to leave the field.

“Not intentional,” Assaf says. “I think I was probably just slow.”

(Top photo courtesy of Assaf family)