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Article from the Hartford Courant
STORRS -- It's 3 in the morning on an April day and Kerri Anderson just wants to get some sleep.
With a baby due in mid-May, she needs rest.
Her husband can't sleep.
He's bouncing around their small apartment just off the UConn campus like it's the middle of the day. Without his accustomed springtime outlet for releasing energy, Deon Anderson can't put things in neutral. The college playing days of the former Huskies fullback ended in December.
"This time of year he's usually into spring practice and he's so used to being out on the field playing and getting rid of that energy, but that hasn't happened this year," Kerri says. "When I'm tired and he's wired, I've got to tell him, `Deon, just slow down.'"
But Anderson just wants things to speed up.
In the past few months Anderson has had some big days. On Dec. 10 he was named UConn's 2006 MVP. On Dec. 28, he and Kerri found out they were having a boy. The next day, he married Kerri, whom he had dated since he was 15.
On Dec. 30, he found out he was on the list of invitees to the NFL combine, where draft prospects go to prove themselves.
The next big day comes a week from today, the second day of the NFL draft, when Anderson (5 feet 11, 243 pounds) will find out the next step in his football career. He has been projected as a late-round pick.
To think he nearly threw it all away.
Anderson, 24, was 2 when his mother left Providence, leaving three sons in the care of his father, Terry. He remembers seeing her one day in the park and then she was gone.
Soon, his father felt the burden of raising three sons alone and put them in the care of his mother Maxine, who eventually adopted her three grandsons. In a tough area of South Providence, Anderson was raised by his grandmother, whom he calls Ma, his aunt, Tanya, and his father.
He knew at a young age he wasn't living in the best of areas.
"But I never felt threatened," Anderson said. "I knew it was a bad neighborhood, but I grew up around it so I wasn't afraid of it. I saw it as the norm. There would be drug dealers living down the street, working on the street when we'd be out there playing. Ma would yell at the drug dealers if they went near us. She'd scream, `Get away from those kids,' and they'd be like `Sorry, Mrs. Anderson. Sorry.'"
Anderson's first memories of football were when he was 6. His older brother Raymond was playing. Deon was on the sideline. Raymond got tackled.
"So I ran out on the field and tackled the guy that tackled my brother," Anderson said. "I didn't have any pads on or anything. The coach came over and picked me up off the ground. He's like, `What are you doing?' And I said, `He hit my brother.' And he said, `That's what you do in football.' I was like, `Oh, really?' Then I wanted to hit people."
Anderson said the work ethic that drives him on the football field was instilled at a young age by his father, a construction worker.
"He'd come in early in the morning and say, `Deon, you want to make some money?'" Anderson said. "He'd have a mask and a hard hat and some goggles and sledgehammer and bring me into an abandoned house to do demolition. He'd be like, `Have fun,' and just leave.
"In the winters, we'd get some shovels and literally walk from one side of Providence to the other. I'm talking a good hour from where we were. We'd just knock on a door and say, `We'll shovel your walkways for $10.'"
As he grew older and bigger, Anderson became a force in youth football, and coaches from the private Portsmouth Abbey School in Portsmouth, R.I., came calling before he was a freshman in high school.
He spent two years at Portsmouth Abbey before returning to Providence to attend Hope High School. After a year at Hope he landed at Avon Old Farms, where he spent two years, becoming a standout wrestler while continuing to build his reputation as a bruising football player.
He was a senior at Avon Old Farms when the phone rang.
It was his mother Sabrina.
"She got my number at Avon and called me because she knew she was dying; she had cancer," Anderson said. "She died a couple months later, but I talked to her a lot before she died. But I never talked to her about why she left. I always assumed that there was some important reason that she had to leave, but I never really questioned why and never really talked to my dad about it. I never disliked my mother in any way because she left."
Anderson arrived at UConn in 2002 and immediately made an impact, starting six games at fullback as a true freshman and impressing former UConn quarterback Dan Orlovsky, who played three seasons with Anderson.
"He's one of the guys that you want on your team," Orlovsky said. "Just a great teammate and a great player. You always knew he was going to give you everything he had. There was never a question of whether or not he was going to play hard."
Anderson got into every game that year, but in the spring of 2003 he was charged with breach of peace during spring weekend for his involvement in an off-campus incident. Anderson, who said he was breaking up a fight when he was arrested, was granted accelerated rehabilitation.
Anderson started five games in 2003 and played in all 12 , becoming a force on special teams. His reputation as the hardest worker on the field was growing in 2004, but in September of that year he found himself in trouble again.
A woman who worked in the mailroom of the Hilltop Apartment complex where Anderson lived accused him of exposing himself during an argument.
Anderson said he did nothing more than yell at the women for withholding a package from him. He said his ability to fight the charges was hampered because he couldn't afford legal representation so he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct, receiving a 90-day suspended sentence and a year of probation in January 2005.
Things were worse in the classroom; he was facing academic dismissal. In the summer of 2005, he withdrew from UConn.
"It didn't look like I was going to be eligible to play the next season and I knew I had to do something to change the path I was on," Anderson said. "I wanted to transfer somewhere and get another start, so I withdrew."
After leaving school, Anderson got an apartment in Willimantic and worked odd jobs, from gas station clerk to the overnight line at FedEx. After getting rebuffed by a handful of schools Anderson reapplied to UConn and returned in January 2006.
Living In The Locker Room
UConn coach Randy Edsall took him back on the team, but as a non-scholarship walk-on.
"It was hard for me, but it was something that had to be done, and I think it helped him in his life," Edsall said. "The thing is, he showed me a lot of character by doing the things that he needed to do. He paid his own way for a semester and came back here and showed me that this team was important to him and this university was important to him and that football was important. When he came back he was a different person. Sometimes people have to lose something to make them really appreciate what they have."
His Aunt Tanya said she co-signed on a student loan for Anderson to pay the tuition; she was under the impression that he was going to be living with friends off campus.
What Anderson never told his family - or Edsall - was that he didn't have the money for an apartment.
"I guess I had this idea that if I was going to do this, if I was going to do things right and get myself right, that I had to do it on my own," Anderson said.
Anderson said he spent the semester living in the old football team locker room in the facilities building next to Gampel Pavilion.
"If you were a player you know the secret ways to get in," Anderson said. "I asked a friend who had a car that wasn't running but was registered on campus if I could keep all my stuff inside his car. There was a players lounge in the locker room. I would just sleep on a big couch in there. I'd shower up, change into what I was going to wear the next day and set my cellphone to wake me. I'd get up around 5:30 every morning.
"Sometimes the cleaning people would come in early in the morning and they'd think I was in there napping after doing an early workout or something. I'd just leave there and go get something to eat, then just go hang out at the library until classes started. Then later I'd go to someone's apartment off campus or something and just chill there till it got late. Then I'd go to my friend's car, get a change of clothes, go to the locker room and sleep on the couch again. That was every day."
At the time, Kerri was attending Sacred Heart in Fairfield, working on her master's in physical therapy. He would call her at night from a phone in the locker room.
"She worried about what I was doing," Anderson said. "But she just kept telling me, `If this is what you have to do right now to accomplish what it is you want to accomplish, then I'm for it.'"
Edsall said he didn't know Anderson had been living in the locker room.
"That building was never locked so I can't say that it couldn't have happened," Edsall said. "But it's news to me."
After the spring 2006 semester, Anderson was put back on scholarship, which allowed him to get an off-campus apartment. He says he is a semester's work shy of earning a degree in sociology.
Practicing Like He Plays
Anderson finished his senior season with 78 yards rushing on 23 carries and had 14 receptions for 101 yards. As had been the case in previous years, it wasn't Anderson's statistics that were getting him noticed, but the little things that are big things to pro scouts: his intensity, his blocking, his work on special teams and the way he practiced.
"During practice when I was around, guys would always know, tighten the helmet a little bit, we're about to bang," said Anderson, who had nine tackles last season. "There's an on switch in me that is just on all the time on the football field. I never looked at it like practice. I never separated games from practice."
Edsall said he has never coached anyone who has enjoyed the game as much as Anderson.
"He's the most unique person I've been around when it comes to how every day he goes out and gives everything he has from a practice standpoint," Edsall said. "He's never down. He's always up. You just never see that out of people."
It was that attitude and drive that had NFL scouts making the trip to Storrs to check out practices in 2006.
"At first I didn't realize they were even looking at me," Anderson said. "After practice, guys would say, `Did you see the scout out there?' People would tell me they were there to watch me and they were asking coaches about me. I was just amazed: `NFL scouts are asking about me?'"
Anderson's numbers at the combine were on par with the other three fullbacks in attendance. He ran a 4.73-yard 40-yard dash and bench-pressed 225 pounds 23 times.
"It went better than I expected," Anderson said. "I noticed when I was getting interviewed by a team, as soon as they finished and I stood up, there was three or four teams grabbing at me, pulling at me, like, `Deon, come here, we want to talk to you.'"
Most draft experts expect Anderson to get picked in the seventh and final round. If he isn't chosen, he's expected to get an immediate invitation to a camp as a free agent.
"He's a fullback and fullbacks are not necessarily going to be the highest-rated players on the board," said Rob Rang, senior analyst for NFLDraftScout.com. "And the fact that he played at UConn, which isn't known out there for producing talent like a Miami or other places, doesn't help him. But I think the interest out there for him is real.
"When you watch him play, his strength is absolutely as a physical sledgehammer. He's a load as a run blocker. He's effective as a pass blocker and he has minimal value as far as a running back. He can catch the ball out of the backfield and that definitely helps. I think where he's going to stand out, where that passion for playing the game comes in, is the way he plays special teams.
"He plays there like you want guys to play, with a passion and a fire, and he knows how to play on special teams. A lot of guys you draft late and put them on special teams, they've never played there because they've been among the best athletes on their teams. He has played that and has done it at a high level. I think that's what is probably going to get him drafted."
The Patriots reportedly are interested in Anderson.
"You can't deny the fact that he's a Patriots kind of player," Rang said. "He's got that character to him that football is life. It's players with that character that have helped make New England a dynasty. They're never the most athletically gifted team, but they're truly a team and that's what characterizes Anderson the most."
Anderson said the first thing that comes to mind when he thinks about playing in the NFL is being able to give back to his family, especially his father, who has been unable to work since 2004 because of respiratory problems.
"Ever since I started playing football, back when I was a little kid, I've always thought about the fact that maybe someday football would be a way for me to help out my family," Anderson said.
His father, of course, would love to see him land in New England.
"It would be great, but to me, just finding out he might have a chance anywhere in the NFL, that right there will put tears in my eyes, if my son that came out of the ghetto, out of the hood, could make it to the NFL," Terry Anderson said. "He's come from nothing."
Contact Shawn Courchesne at scourchesne@courant.com
STORRS -- It's 3 in the morning on an April day and Kerri Anderson just wants to get some sleep.
With a baby due in mid-May, she needs rest.
Her husband can't sleep.
He's bouncing around their small apartment just off the UConn campus like it's the middle of the day. Without his accustomed springtime outlet for releasing energy, Deon Anderson can't put things in neutral. The college playing days of the former Huskies fullback ended in December.
"This time of year he's usually into spring practice and he's so used to being out on the field playing and getting rid of that energy, but that hasn't happened this year," Kerri says. "When I'm tired and he's wired, I've got to tell him, `Deon, just slow down.'"
But Anderson just wants things to speed up.
In the past few months Anderson has had some big days. On Dec. 10 he was named UConn's 2006 MVP. On Dec. 28, he and Kerri found out they were having a boy. The next day, he married Kerri, whom he had dated since he was 15.
On Dec. 30, he found out he was on the list of invitees to the NFL combine, where draft prospects go to prove themselves.
The next big day comes a week from today, the second day of the NFL draft, when Anderson (5 feet 11, 243 pounds) will find out the next step in his football career. He has been projected as a late-round pick.
To think he nearly threw it all away.
Anderson, 24, was 2 when his mother left Providence, leaving three sons in the care of his father, Terry. He remembers seeing her one day in the park and then she was gone.
Soon, his father felt the burden of raising three sons alone and put them in the care of his mother Maxine, who eventually adopted her three grandsons. In a tough area of South Providence, Anderson was raised by his grandmother, whom he calls Ma, his aunt, Tanya, and his father.
He knew at a young age he wasn't living in the best of areas.
"But I never felt threatened," Anderson said. "I knew it was a bad neighborhood, but I grew up around it so I wasn't afraid of it. I saw it as the norm. There would be drug dealers living down the street, working on the street when we'd be out there playing. Ma would yell at the drug dealers if they went near us. She'd scream, `Get away from those kids,' and they'd be like `Sorry, Mrs. Anderson. Sorry.'"
Anderson's first memories of football were when he was 6. His older brother Raymond was playing. Deon was on the sideline. Raymond got tackled.
"So I ran out on the field and tackled the guy that tackled my brother," Anderson said. "I didn't have any pads on or anything. The coach came over and picked me up off the ground. He's like, `What are you doing?' And I said, `He hit my brother.' And he said, `That's what you do in football.' I was like, `Oh, really?' Then I wanted to hit people."
Anderson said the work ethic that drives him on the football field was instilled at a young age by his father, a construction worker.
"He'd come in early in the morning and say, `Deon, you want to make some money?'" Anderson said. "He'd have a mask and a hard hat and some goggles and sledgehammer and bring me into an abandoned house to do demolition. He'd be like, `Have fun,' and just leave.
"In the winters, we'd get some shovels and literally walk from one side of Providence to the other. I'm talking a good hour from where we were. We'd just knock on a door and say, `We'll shovel your walkways for $10.'"
As he grew older and bigger, Anderson became a force in youth football, and coaches from the private Portsmouth Abbey School in Portsmouth, R.I., came calling before he was a freshman in high school.
He spent two years at Portsmouth Abbey before returning to Providence to attend Hope High School. After a year at Hope he landed at Avon Old Farms, where he spent two years, becoming a standout wrestler while continuing to build his reputation as a bruising football player.
He was a senior at Avon Old Farms when the phone rang.
It was his mother Sabrina.
"She got my number at Avon and called me because she knew she was dying; she had cancer," Anderson said. "She died a couple months later, but I talked to her a lot before she died. But I never talked to her about why she left. I always assumed that there was some important reason that she had to leave, but I never really questioned why and never really talked to my dad about it. I never disliked my mother in any way because she left."
Anderson arrived at UConn in 2002 and immediately made an impact, starting six games at fullback as a true freshman and impressing former UConn quarterback Dan Orlovsky, who played three seasons with Anderson.
"He's one of the guys that you want on your team," Orlovsky said. "Just a great teammate and a great player. You always knew he was going to give you everything he had. There was never a question of whether or not he was going to play hard."
Anderson got into every game that year, but in the spring of 2003 he was charged with breach of peace during spring weekend for his involvement in an off-campus incident. Anderson, who said he was breaking up a fight when he was arrested, was granted accelerated rehabilitation.
Anderson started five games in 2003 and played in all 12 , becoming a force on special teams. His reputation as the hardest worker on the field was growing in 2004, but in September of that year he found himself in trouble again.
A woman who worked in the mailroom of the Hilltop Apartment complex where Anderson lived accused him of exposing himself during an argument.
Anderson said he did nothing more than yell at the women for withholding a package from him. He said his ability to fight the charges was hampered because he couldn't afford legal representation so he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct, receiving a 90-day suspended sentence and a year of probation in January 2005.
Things were worse in the classroom; he was facing academic dismissal. In the summer of 2005, he withdrew from UConn.
"It didn't look like I was going to be eligible to play the next season and I knew I had to do something to change the path I was on," Anderson said. "I wanted to transfer somewhere and get another start, so I withdrew."
After leaving school, Anderson got an apartment in Willimantic and worked odd jobs, from gas station clerk to the overnight line at FedEx. After getting rebuffed by a handful of schools Anderson reapplied to UConn and returned in January 2006.
Living In The Locker Room
UConn coach Randy Edsall took him back on the team, but as a non-scholarship walk-on.
"It was hard for me, but it was something that had to be done, and I think it helped him in his life," Edsall said. "The thing is, he showed me a lot of character by doing the things that he needed to do. He paid his own way for a semester and came back here and showed me that this team was important to him and this university was important to him and that football was important. When he came back he was a different person. Sometimes people have to lose something to make them really appreciate what they have."
His Aunt Tanya said she co-signed on a student loan for Anderson to pay the tuition; she was under the impression that he was going to be living with friends off campus.
What Anderson never told his family - or Edsall - was that he didn't have the money for an apartment.
"I guess I had this idea that if I was going to do this, if I was going to do things right and get myself right, that I had to do it on my own," Anderson said.
Anderson said he spent the semester living in the old football team locker room in the facilities building next to Gampel Pavilion.
"If you were a player you know the secret ways to get in," Anderson said. "I asked a friend who had a car that wasn't running but was registered on campus if I could keep all my stuff inside his car. There was a players lounge in the locker room. I would just sleep on a big couch in there. I'd shower up, change into what I was going to wear the next day and set my cellphone to wake me. I'd get up around 5:30 every morning.
"Sometimes the cleaning people would come in early in the morning and they'd think I was in there napping after doing an early workout or something. I'd just leave there and go get something to eat, then just go hang out at the library until classes started. Then later I'd go to someone's apartment off campus or something and just chill there till it got late. Then I'd go to my friend's car, get a change of clothes, go to the locker room and sleep on the couch again. That was every day."
At the time, Kerri was attending Sacred Heart in Fairfield, working on her master's in physical therapy. He would call her at night from a phone in the locker room.
"She worried about what I was doing," Anderson said. "But she just kept telling me, `If this is what you have to do right now to accomplish what it is you want to accomplish, then I'm for it.'"
Edsall said he didn't know Anderson had been living in the locker room.
"That building was never locked so I can't say that it couldn't have happened," Edsall said. "But it's news to me."
After the spring 2006 semester, Anderson was put back on scholarship, which allowed him to get an off-campus apartment. He says he is a semester's work shy of earning a degree in sociology.
Practicing Like He Plays
Anderson finished his senior season with 78 yards rushing on 23 carries and had 14 receptions for 101 yards. As had been the case in previous years, it wasn't Anderson's statistics that were getting him noticed, but the little things that are big things to pro scouts: his intensity, his blocking, his work on special teams and the way he practiced.
"During practice when I was around, guys would always know, tighten the helmet a little bit, we're about to bang," said Anderson, who had nine tackles last season. "There's an on switch in me that is just on all the time on the football field. I never looked at it like practice. I never separated games from practice."
Edsall said he has never coached anyone who has enjoyed the game as much as Anderson.
"He's the most unique person I've been around when it comes to how every day he goes out and gives everything he has from a practice standpoint," Edsall said. "He's never down. He's always up. You just never see that out of people."
It was that attitude and drive that had NFL scouts making the trip to Storrs to check out practices in 2006.
"At first I didn't realize they were even looking at me," Anderson said. "After practice, guys would say, `Did you see the scout out there?' People would tell me they were there to watch me and they were asking coaches about me. I was just amazed: `NFL scouts are asking about me?'"
Anderson's numbers at the combine were on par with the other three fullbacks in attendance. He ran a 4.73-yard 40-yard dash and bench-pressed 225 pounds 23 times.
"It went better than I expected," Anderson said. "I noticed when I was getting interviewed by a team, as soon as they finished and I stood up, there was three or four teams grabbing at me, pulling at me, like, `Deon, come here, we want to talk to you.'"
Most draft experts expect Anderson to get picked in the seventh and final round. If he isn't chosen, he's expected to get an immediate invitation to a camp as a free agent.
"He's a fullback and fullbacks are not necessarily going to be the highest-rated players on the board," said Rob Rang, senior analyst for NFLDraftScout.com. "And the fact that he played at UConn, which isn't known out there for producing talent like a Miami or other places, doesn't help him. But I think the interest out there for him is real.
"When you watch him play, his strength is absolutely as a physical sledgehammer. He's a load as a run blocker. He's effective as a pass blocker and he has minimal value as far as a running back. He can catch the ball out of the backfield and that definitely helps. I think where he's going to stand out, where that passion for playing the game comes in, is the way he plays special teams.
"He plays there like you want guys to play, with a passion and a fire, and he knows how to play on special teams. A lot of guys you draft late and put them on special teams, they've never played there because they've been among the best athletes on their teams. He has played that and has done it at a high level. I think that's what is probably going to get him drafted."
The Patriots reportedly are interested in Anderson.
"You can't deny the fact that he's a Patriots kind of player," Rang said. "He's got that character to him that football is life. It's players with that character that have helped make New England a dynasty. They're never the most athletically gifted team, but they're truly a team and that's what characterizes Anderson the most."
Anderson said the first thing that comes to mind when he thinks about playing in the NFL is being able to give back to his family, especially his father, who has been unable to work since 2004 because of respiratory problems.
"Ever since I started playing football, back when I was a little kid, I've always thought about the fact that maybe someday football would be a way for me to help out my family," Anderson said.
His father, of course, would love to see him land in New England.
"It would be great, but to me, just finding out he might have a chance anywhere in the NFL, that right there will put tears in my eyes, if my son that came out of the ghetto, out of the hood, could make it to the NFL," Terry Anderson said. "He's come from nothing."
Contact Shawn Courchesne at scourchesne@courant.com
