The squat rack faced the wall, so Cameron Lynch couldn’t see behind him.

His father, Sean Lynch, was his spotter as the rising high school junior went through 16 reps at almost 380 pounds in a Houston gym. Lynch was in the early stages of learning how to squat.

Or supposedly so. When his father looked up, seven gym rats had surrounded the rack, watching in awe of Lynch’s impeccable form and asking if Sean Lynch was a trainer, not the 16-year-old’s father.

“If I can’t grow taller, I can go wider and stronger,” Lynch said. “That was the plan.”

To combat what scouts call a height deficiency, the 6-foot tall Lynch conquered the weight room and developed into a stud linebacker and an NFL hopeful for Syracuse. His strength has formed him into one of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s top tacklers, while his experience and leadership qualities earned him a captain role this season.

And when the Orange (3-6, 1-4 ACC) holds its Senior Day ceremony before its game against No. 22 Duke on Saturday — knowing it needs to win to preserve bowl eligibility — Lynch will have one last time to play before the Carrier Dome crowd.

“It’s all come and gone so fast. To see his progression, him growing from when he first walked in as a freshman to now,” Sean Lynch said. “To see all of that culminate this Saturday, that’s what’s going to get me teary-eyed and smiling at the same time.

“… And he’s not done yet. He wants to go to the next level. It may not be pretty, but he’ll get there.”

Lynch’s weight-room prowess quickly became too much for his father to keep up with — and Sean Lynch was once a Division I linebacker himself. He played baseball and walked onto the football team at Colorado in the 1980s, but transferred after one year.

His passion for football bred his son’s.

“I credit all my success to him,” Lynch said, “because he got me started.”

Though adolescence naturally helped Lynch drop his youthful chunkiness, after his freshman year in high school he and his father researched and designed a program that included weight lifting, plyometric work and exercises utilizing his own body weight.

Even if it meant jumping over trash cans or bounding onto student desks to replicate box jumps in the 100-degree heat of Houston — where he visited his father for the summers — Lynch was determined not to feel puny anymore. Core exercises and hip and flexibility work fine-tuned him into even more of a specimen.

“He’s a very, very, very strong human being,” SU defensive coordinator Chuck Bullough said.

Lynch’s athleticism was apparent at a combine-style UCLA football camp going into his junior year of high school. After waiting in a line of 60 players, he took his shoes off, furrowing the eyebrows around him, but then raised them as he hit 38 inches in the vertical jump, his father said. Then Lynch repeated it when he was dared to do it again. It was one of the highest marks at the camp, Sean Lynch said.

On the field, he was soon a 215-pound beast making 135 and 188 tackles in his jun-ior and senior seasons, respectively, at Brookwood (Georgia) High School.

He even scored a touchdown on a wheel route in his one time moonlighting as a fullback for Brookwood and won a state championship in his senior season. The championship game was one of the best individual high school performances SU head coach Scott Shafer said he has ever seen.

Still, recruiters from Virginia and Georgia Tech and a shortage of interest from the Southeastern Conference surrounding Lynch told him he was too short to make it as a college linebacker.

“Man, if I was 6-2, I’d be getting all kinds of offers. I could go anywhere,” Lynch said at the time to his father.

“Yeah, but you know what? You’re not,” Sean Lynch told him. “You play like you’re 6-2, 6-3, and that’s what you’re going to do from this point on, but you’re not.”

“He got over that,” Sean Lynch says now, “and he never looked back.”

Lynch knew he wanted to take Syracuse’s offer after his official visit and passed on offers from Harvard and Vanderbilt, according to his Scout.com profile. He earned three starts through his first two years with the Orange before taking on a starting role last year and finishing as SU’s second-leading tackler with 69.

This year his 73 tackles lead the Orange, his 54 solo tackles rank second in the ACC and his 6.5 sacks are tied for third in the conference. In May, he was named the No. 4 “freakish” athlete in college sports by an NFL.com college football writer. Shafer used the same word to describe Lynch’s numbers in the weight room.

He’s done his part in passing on the Syracuse linebacking torch, first by learning un-der Siriki Diabate and Dan Vaughan, then ascending with Marquis Spruill and cur-rent roommate Dyshawn Davis.

Now he’s close to handing it off to underclassmen Zaire Franklin and Marqez Hodge.

“He’s a vocal guy that gets everybody in the right mindset,” Bullough said. “He understands what we want to do. Coaches, we say it but it’s bigger when it comes from one of their peers.”

He’s intent on riding his football career out to the very end, however long his skills pan out for if he’s given an opportunity in the NFL.

But after speaking with reporters in the Iocolano-Petty Football Wing on Tuesday evening, he had the Graduate Record Exam waiting for him the next day. He also had another episode of his brainchild, Cam’s Cam, to shoot — a weekly video feature in which he interviews his SU teammates, a preview to his aspirational career in broadcasting.

But regardless of when football ends and his next door opens, Lynch has a chapter to close over the next month.

Sean Lynch doesn’t regret how his college playing days ended, but he remembers the experience of knowing he was playing his last college football game.

With three games left, his son approaches that same feeling.

“You don’t want to look back when you’re 40 years old and you’re looking at your-self in the mirror and you start reminiscing, you don’t want to remember the time where you didn’t give it all,” Sean Lynch said. “Leave it all out there.

“So when you do have those times when you’re reminiscing and you look back — hey, you’ll be proud of yourself.”

Published on November 7, 2014 at 12:03 am

Contact Phil: pmdabbra@syr.edu | @PhilDAbb