From Turf to Tarmac: Penn State’s Matt Lehman Takes Talents to NASCAR

Matt Lehman last took the field for the Nittany Lions in 2013, pulling in just two passes.

His most memorable highlight was a touchdown that never was. It would’ve been the go-ahead score for Penn State against Nebraska in 2012.

Lehman reached across the end zone before the ball was knocked out, and everyone but the referees thought it was a score.

And now, the former Penn State tight end is continuing to fight for playing time, except this time he’ll be standing on the tarmac and holding tire jacks and gas cans instead of standing on the turf with a pigskin in hand.

Lehman announced on Facebook that he earned a new athletic job on Wednesday, not long after a tryout attempt with former Penn State head coach Bill O’Brien’s Houston Texans ended in injury at the first practice.

The former Penn State tight end is joining a different kind of sports team: Hendrick Motorsports, an American auto racing team that competes in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. The team includes Kasey Kahne, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr., four big names in the NASCAR world.

Lehman won’t be behind the wheel, but he’ll be helping out those who are on pit road, joining the team’s pit crew, which does tire changes and gas refuelings during races. A few weeks before his trip to Houston, Lehman got a call from a recruiter with Hendrick.

“I said that I didn’t know anything about NASCAR and he said that was okay and they were just looking for athletes and would teach us everything we needed to know when we got there,” Lehman says.

He wasn’t sure what to expect when to headed to Charlotte, N.C., for the tryout, but was surprised to find a combine-style slew of football workouts and tests. The tryouts were run by a former Miami Dolphins scout, and the format gave Lehman an edge up on the competition, including the usual array of bench presses, vertical jumps, and shuttle runs.

“We trained for those at Penn State, whereas they also have wrestlers and baseball players there who probably didn’t train those things,” Lehman says. “So I felt very comfortable in that type of a situation.

The tryout started with a list of 90 candidates, which was worked down to 40 for the Charlotte tryout. The second round, which brought more racing and less football, included just 18 people, and Lehman was one of them.

“For the second, they actually put the jack in your hand and the 90-pound gas can in your hand and saw what we could do with it,” he says.

Apparently, he did enough, because out of the 18 to participate in the second round, Lehman was one of those selected for the job. He doesn’t know all that much about racing, but his athletic ability was impressive enough to earn him on spot on pit road.

“My dad took me to a race in Dover back when I was a younger teen, but other than that I haven’t been a big fan or anything,” Lehman says. “If I had to say who my favorite driver is, it’d be Jeff Gordon. Whenever I would watch, I’d root for him, so it’s kind of cool that I’m joining the organization that he came up in. He’s retiring this year, so I don’t know if I’ll have an opportunity to meet him or not.”

While it might not be the NFL opportunity that Lehman was hoping for, his new job at Hendrick Motorsports puts him back on a team competing for a goal, and that’s what excites Lehman most about his move to Charlotte. 

“The part that I look forward to the most is just being part of a team,” he says. “That’s the part I miss most about being at Penn State, just being around the guys and being a part of a team and trying to go out there and accomplish something.”