The players call him “Coach Dean.”

You can see DeAngelo Dean on the sideline at every Johnson C. Smith football game, making sure the team gets the right personnel into the game in third-and-long situations and conferring with other coaches like former Carolina Panther Mike Minter about the Golden Bulls’ defensive strategy.

For Coach Dean, the sideline feels like home. And every time he walks onto the field feels like a victory.

Dean, 24, has cerebral palsy - a neurological disorder that appears in infancy or early childhood and permanently affects body movement and muscle coordination. But that hasn’t stopped Dean from becoming a valued member of coach Steve Aycock’s J.C. Smith staff in 2011. Aycock was the one who took a chance on Dean to begin with, and the student assistant coach has surpassed expectations as the Division II Golden Bulls have posted one of their best seasons in years.

“I feel like I’ve achieved something,” Dean said, sitting on the J.C. Smith campus and explaining how this all came to be. “I am so happy that I’m getting to start fulfilling my dream by coaching. I’ve got a lot to be thankful for.”

Said Minter, the Golden Bulls’ co-defensive coordinator this season and Dean’s direct supervisor as the defensive backs coach: “DeAngelo has a great attitude. It’s really been one of the greatest experiences I’ve been able to have, watching him grow.”

Dean walks with a slight limp. The fingers on his left hand curl into a claw-like position. He turns his head a little more than most people during conversations since he is legally blind in his left eye. The defensive backs make sure to hand him the ball during interception drills rather than throwing it back to him since Dean has a hard time catching it.

But over time, the players and coaches at J.C. Smith have accepted Dean as a trusted peer - focusing not on what he can’t do but on what he can.

Unbuttoning a coat

When Dean was born, in 1987 in Washington, D.C., he was in the birth canal longer than normal. Vivian Dean, his mother, believes that is what caused his cerebral palsy. His complications were so severe that doctors told Vivian Dean her son might not live through the night, and that even if he did that his life expectancy would likely be no longer than 10 years.

Shortly after the birth, a doctor brought Vivian Dean a catalog that featured pictures of baby caskets. The doctor meant no harm. He was attempting to show the family that if her baby died in the hospital, a casket would be provided free of charge.

Still, the gesture upset the family. Vivian’s sister angrily chased the doctor down the hall, thrust the catalog back at him and told him they weren’t going to need it.

And they didn’t.

“I promised the Lord that if He would let me bring DeAngelo home from the hospital that I’d take care of him,” Vivian Dean said.

And she has. Dean grew up with an older brother and a younger sister, mostly in the Washington area. His father Peter was in the home, too, until he and Vivian separated when DeAngelo was 7 . Still, Peter Dean continued providing financially for the family and played a role in DeAngelo’s life until Peter’s death in 2008.

DeAngelo was fortunate to not be intellectually impaired - in many cerebral palsy cases, brain abnormalities are also a factor. But his physical disabilities caused a host of problems.

In kindergarten, DeAngelo once wore his coat all day in class because he couldn’t unbutton it and a busy teacher didn’t take time to do it for him. That afternoon he told his parents what had happened.

“Then he practiced all night,” Vivian Dean said. “And when he went back to school the next day, he could take his coat off himself. I wouldn’t button it when he left, and he got to where he could go into the coat room and kind of shake it off his body. It was a little different than what the other kids did, but he got it off. I’ll never forget that.”

‘We decided to help him’

DeAngelo wanted to play sports but his mother worried that a hard hit to the head would cause more damage. He tried organized football and basketball, but only briefly. He competed in the Special Olympics. He filled his spare time watching sports on TV, particularly football. That was his passion.

Now, when the Golden Bulls are getting close to a kickoff, Dean will walk around the other players, pining for a chance to play for the historically black private college.

“I tell the players on Friday nights before our games, ‘Boy, I wish I could play with y’all tomorrow,’” Dean said. “Let me get that jersey. Let me get those pads. Let me hit somebody. It looks like so much fun.”

As a kid, Dean decided he wanted to be a sports announcer. He liked to watch Chris Berman and other announcers on ESPN and figured that would be a career worth pursuing.

The family moved from Washington, D.C., to Charlotte for the first time in 2003. Vivian Dean had family in North Carolina and she found out that DeAngelo – who had always wanted to go to college – would be able to find a better support system and obtain a high school diploma in Charlotte.

A series of moves from Washington, D.C. to Charlotte and back followed, most of them caused by Vivian temporarily returning to the D.C. area to care for sick relatives.

The kids bounced back and forth, too, with DeAngelo attending East Mecklenburg for awhile before eventually graduating from a high school in Riverdale, Md., in 2005. Not long after that, he and his family moved back to Charlotte for good.

Vivian Dean worried that DeAngelo wouldn’t make it on his own in college, however. So she waited until his sister DeAndra – who was four years younger – graduated from Myers Park and enrolled at Saint Augustine’s in Raleigh. After DeAndra went there for a semester, Vivian sent DeAngelo to Saint Augustine’s, too, in January 2010.

He didn’t fit in particularly well, though, and his mother decided she wanted him closer to home. DeAngelo transferred to J.C. Smith in January 2011, where he is academically a sophomore and where he had wanted to go all along.

By then, Dean had changed career dreams. He now wants to become a football coach, preferably in the NFL, instead of a sports announcer. He decided the first step was to get around a football team. Dean had never played the sport except for those few practices at age 7 , but he had studied it on TV. He emailed Aycock about obtaining a possible “work-study” job with the Golden Bulls.

“He impressed me when we met,” Aycock said. “So we decided to help him try to accomplish his dream. He started in August, and right away I learned that you have to run him out of practice. If the cerebral palsy does slow him down, I’ve never seen it.”

‘We’re all Golden Bulls’

Dean said for the first few games he felt more like a fan than a coach on the sideline, riding the emotional waves. He nearly got penalized once for stepping onto the field during a game. But he watched the way Aycock, the head coach, calmly weathered highs and lows and decided that was the best way to approach things.

The players initially wondered about how to take this 5-foot-6, 220-pound student who was barely older than most of them.

“At first, when Coach Dean joined us, he was pretty quiet,” said Darius Johnson, a senior cornerback for J.C. Smith. “But then coach Minter told us, ‘This is my assistant defensive backs coach.’ And we started getting to know him and found out he just wanted to be one of the guys. He’s very intelligent. Really knows the game. We get tired in practice and look over at him and he’s an inspiration. How can we be tired when we see what he’s doing? He’s like family now.”

Dean’s long-range plan? Help out at J.C. Smith for the next couple of years until he finishes college, then go to grad school somewhere and become a graduate assistant coach. He can’t drive because of his physical disabilities, but he has always gotten rides from his family members and teammates at Smith. He believes he has found his niche.

“On the sideline,” DeAngelo said, “I feel normal. Accepted. We’re all Golden Bulls.”

Said DeWayne Etheridge, DeAngelo’s older brother: “I am so happy to see him get to do what he’s been dreaming of doing for years.”

The ‘Dean’ package

For now, Dean and the rest of the Golden Bulls are busy. Johnson C. Smith, which has an enrollment of about 1,500, went 2-8 in 2010 and 3-7 each of the three years before that.

But this season has been quite a success compared to the previous four – the Golden Bulls are 5-5 (4-3 in the CIAA). Their freshman quarterback, Keahn Wallace, was named the CIAA’s offensive rookie of the year.

J.C. Smith was invited to play in a postseason bowl game - the Pioneer Bowl - on Dec.3rd in Columbus, Ga. It will be the first postseason appearance for J.C. Smith since 2006.

In that game, at some point the Golden Bulls will use a special defense that the coaches decided to name for Dean. In third-and-very-long situations, J.C. Smith sometimes employs seven defensive backs instead of the usual four. They call this the “Dean” package.

“You call out ‘Dean! Dean! Dean!’ on the sideline,” Minter said, “and everybody knows what that means.”

When they call that defense, Smith linebackers start running out of the game and defensive backs start running in to replace them.

It is chaotic for a few seconds. And Dean loves it – both the chaos and the camaraderie. He slaps players’ backs with his good hand as they fly in and out of the game, encouraging them. He smiles. He is in the middle of a football team, just like he has always wanted.