From 1925 to 1931 the Providence Steam Roller football team competed in the National Football League (NFL).   In 1928 they captured the league championship, the last title won by a team that is no longer in the league.  After they dropped out of the NFL during the Depression, the Steam Roller competed as a semi-pro, minor league, or independent outfit.

Five Warren athletes competed for the Steam Roller in the 1930s and 1940s.  Duke Abbruzzi, Charlie Burdge, Ben Polak, and Ricky Vitullo are all individual members of the Warren Athletic Hall of Fame.  Offensive guard and linebacker Sam Correia, the last of the five to suit up for this illustrious team (following World War Two), now joins them in the Hall of Fame. In 1947 Sam was a member of the twenty-man Roller eleven that captured the New England Pro Football Championship.

Earlier Sam had worn the uniform of Warren’s Narragansett A. A. (Narries) semi-pro eleven in 1940 and 1941.  The latter squad finished with a record of 3-1-3, having notched shutouts in five of their seven games and allowed the Riverside Crescents only two first downs.  In the final game, a 6-0 defeat of the Riverside Barons, Sam and Gabby Galinelli were identified in the media as the team’s “line stars.”

Following World War Two he also played for the Warren Townies for two years before coaching them in 1948.  His last football playing stint came in 1951 for the Bristol Colts gridders that won the unofficial New England Semi-Pro Championship.  However, Sam was no longer on the scene for the title-winning game; he entered an earlier game for his only play of the season, tackled a former Boston College runner on the kickoff, and ended up in the hospital with a concussion.  He retired while in his hospital bed.

In 1958 he and fellow Hall of Fame member Bill Willis founded Little League Football in Warren.  And then Sam, along with Steve Ferri and Bob MacDougall, coached the red and white-clad Giants to the league’s first championship.

Sam had earned Class C baseball honors at Warren High School in the spring of 1940 and that fall played in the Warren/Bristol Little World Series.  The following year he was a member of the Crown Zippers nine that won the regular season Championship of the Rhode Island State Baseball League.  And in 1949 he competed for Warren’s Standard Pharmacy team that came very close to winning the Providence Amateur League title.

He played for the Dairy Bar semipro basketball five in 1942 and was a member of the Ellis Buick team that won the 1951 Red Feather Community Basketball League title.

In fast-pitch softball the two championship teams on which he competed were separated by fifteen years, Kettlety’s Firestones of 1946 and Smith’s Drug of 1961.

Pictures from Hall of Fame archives