A dramatic comeback

The score was just one among dozens on a busy college football Saturday, the moment a small one noticed by few.

For Gallaudet University, however, it was a milestone score and a monumental moment.

The Bison beat St. Vincent College 32-13 in their season opener Sept. 1, a victory that marked the return of the program to varsity football and the school’s first game back in the NCAA’s Division III, a level that includes schools like Catholic University and Frostburg State.

The nation’s only deaf college football team previously operated at the club level and played less competitive opponents. The victory over St. Vincent not only marked the Bison’s debut in the NCAA’s nonscholarship division but also snapped a 34-game losing streak against NCAA teams that dated back to 1991.

“I was completely speechless after the first game because we finally came to a day where we can prove everyone wrong that we, deaf football players, CAN play,” left guard Philip Endicott said in an interview by e-mail.

Losing was so routine at Gallaudet in the mid-1990s that the school dropped the sport to club level. The Bison regularly were blown out in 11 games against D-III opponents from 2000 to 2002. The school decided to re-establish the program as a varsity sport to enhance the student experience and to show that the 1,800-student liberal arts college can compete at a high level.

The victory was the latest brick in the construction of the program since Ed Hottle took over in 2005 as Gallaudet’s first full-time coach.

The program changed immediately: There was a new offseason weightlifting program, an intense recruiting effort and a previously unseen — or even asked for — commitment from players to the team.

“At first, it wasn’t football,” said Jason Coleman, a senior quarterback from Middletown, Md. “We won the deaf national championship at Maryland School for the Deaf when I was a [high school] senior, and coming to Gallaudet where they did not have a great football program was tough and frustrating. The players were there, but the program wasn’t.”

The program drew scant interest — only 21 players came to Hottle’s first team meeting — and produced few wins at first. That sense of futility was a distant memory during a recent practice on the campus in Northeast.

Players uprooted tackling dummies, and pads popped on a muggy September afternoon. Special teams drills got under way. A player missed a block on his man. The coach grimaced, got in the player’s face and shouted, “Do you want to play on Saturday?”

That scene plays out on hundreds of football fields on college campuses across the country. This one is slightly different: The backdrop is a bustling city, with ambulance sirens blaring and constant traffic just off the field at West Virginia and Florida avenues.

Hottle is fiery and loud. The player who missed the block might not have heard Hottle’s choice words, but he clearly picked up on the meaning of the coach’s body and sign language.

The player responded verbally, saying, “I want to play.”

Hottle took a crash course in American Sign Language when he was hired in 2005 after only one season as a high school coach — an adjustment, he said, that is the same as learning a foreign language.

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