Sound and the Fury
When Gallaudet University hired a hearing football coach who knew no sign language, it was a clash of cultures. Two years later, the once-moribund program is making plenty of noise.

By Brooke Foster
Sunday, August 19, 2007

A LARGE BASS DRUM WAS ROLLED TO THE CENTER OF THE FOOTBALL FIELD, and a skinny sophomore wearing hearing aids picked up what looked like a giant matchstick and swung. There was a crack, then an echoing boom. The force smacked Coach Ed Hottle in the chest, sending tremors down to his toes.

Hottle's players also felt the vibration.

It signaled to them to drop to the ground and stretch their legs out. Another drumbeat, and they fell forward over their thighs. Another, and they reached toward their toes.

On this Sunday afternoon last October, the Gallaudet University football team was in Dover, Del., to play Wesley College's junior varsity. Gallaudet is the nation's only university dedicated solely to the hearing impaired, and its club team is the only deaf college football team in the country. After Gallaudet hired Hottle in 2005, the Bison went undefeated for the first time in school history. So far in 2006, they'd won their first three games.

"They ain't going to hear what's coming to them," said a burly Wesley player watching the Gallaudet players. Wesley is a successful NCAA Division III program. The Wesley players were joking about their opponents and wondered aloud what the Bison were saying to one another with their hands.

Hottle knew opposing teams often consider Gallaudet an easy win. He once overheard an assistant coach call the Bison "a bunch of retards." Hottle couldn't wipe the smirk off his face when they beat that team by 10 points.

Now, minutes before kickoff at Wesley, the Gallaudet players gathered together. "How many times have you been shut down, told you couldn't do something?" Bison running back Robert Haney signed. The players grunted. A few made loud screeching noises -- most of them couldn't hear the sounds, but they could feel the vibrations. "They think you're nothing," Haney signed. " They're nothing."

When Hottle spoke, he looked ticked off. "I talked to their coach earlier," Hottle signed. "He said, 'I guess you guys were undefeated. Who did you play?'" Hottle made a disgusted face, then signed. "They ought to know who we played." The players roared.

Two hours later, they'd celebrate their 12th straight win.

ON A MARCH EVENING IN 2005, AS SOON AS HE AND HIS WIFE, ASHLEY, PUT THE KIDS TO BED, Hottle popped in a DVD -- "Signing for Dummies" -- and practiced the alphabet. He wanted to learn how to sign, "My name is Ed Hottle," before his job interview at Gallaudet the following week.

Not long before, Hottle had been skimming through coaching jobs in the NCAA News when he noticed that Gallaudet was searching for a head coach. He figured that there was someone more qualified than he was to lead a deaf football program, but he applied anyway. At the time, he was the coach at Calvert High School, where the team's 2004 record was 1-9, but his dream was to one day run through the tunnel at the University of Notre Dame. He was realistic, though. First, he had to get a head coaching job on the college level. He'd already worked as an assistant coach at Frostburg State University, Denison University and Wesley.

As he drove through the wrought-iron gates of Gallaudet's leafy campus in Northeast Washington, he started to get anxious. He'd grown up in Northern Virginia, but he'd never been to Gallaudet, and he'd never known a deaf person. Just treat them like you would anyone else, he told himself. He reminded himself to look at the person signing -- not the interpreter. His mom had advised him that the latter was considered rude. She'd had a few deaf patients in the doctor's office where she worked as a medical assistant.

Hottle parked his Jeep behind Gallaudet's field house, grabbed the blue binders he'd prepared and went looking for Jimmy DeStefano, the athletic director at the time.

DeStefano came out of his office smiling and put his hand out. He was hard of hearing, not completely deaf. "Hi, Ed," he said. "I'm Jimmy." Hottle shook his hand. Then he held up his hand as if he were under oath and curled his fingers inward. Next he touched all of his fingers except his pinkie to his thumb. "E-D," he signed. "My name is E-D."

DeStefano led Hottle into a room where a few other members of the athletic department -- all deaf -- were waiting, along with Brian Tingley, a 5-foot-11, 255-pound offensive lineman who has a wave crest tattooed like an arm band around his bicep, representing the team. An interpreter sat next to Hottle, with Hottle facing everyone else. He noticed that some individuals wore hearing aids and some didn't. The room was quiet except for the interpreter's voice.

DeStefano explained that the athletic program was in a rebuilding phase. The budget had been stagnant for years, forcing the department to hire part-time coaches. As a result, the football team had suffered. It was losing games by 50 points on occasion. Few guys stayed on the team more than a year. There wasn't anyone to recruit players.

"We want to be D-III again," DeStefano signed. The school withdrew from NCAA Division III football competition in the mid-1990s for reasons having to do with finances, morale and student support. DeStefano has since been removed from the athletic director job. The change came this summer after the NCAA placed the entire Gallaudet athletic program on probation for one year as a result of eligibility violations involving the Bison women's volleyball team.

But in the spring of 2005 the administration had given the athletic department budget a modest boost, and DeStefano expected additional funds to be approved.

When it was time for Hottle to talk, he handed out blue binders he'd carried in. They included information he'd written about his coaching style, how he'd lead an offense and a defense, why education should come before football.

At 34, Hottle's baby face made him seem younger -- if he donned a football jersey, he could be mistaken for an undergrad -- and he talked as if the team would be in military training camp. The players didn't need that, Tingley thought. Previous coaches had failed because they were too strict; players had rebelled and quit.

But DeStefano had a feeling about Hottle. He'd made it clear to Hottle that he'd have to learn sign language, and Hottle appeared to relish the chance. Hottle had more coaching experience than the other candidates. He seemed tough, but, when Hottle talked about his former players, DeStefano sensed a tender streak.

When the offer came, Hottle hesitated. "It is such a different culture," he told Ashley. "What if I can't learn sign language?" What if he couldn't help the team be good enough for D-III? Ashley reminded him that he'd always done whatever he'd set his mind to.

BEFORE HIS FIRST TEAM MEETING, HOTTLE ALREADY HAD BEEN INTRODUCED TO A FEW OF THE PLAYERS. He was unaware that many who had smiled and shook his hand had later complained that he couldn't sign.

Word had spread through the deaf community that Gallaudet had hired a hearing football coach. It wasn't the "hearing" piece that bothered most people. The university had hired other hearing coaches before. The difference was that those individuals could already sign. Lineman Tingley asked quarterback Jason Coleman, "What was the point in playing if we can't even communicate with the coach?"

Both players also worried Hottle might make some common uninformed assumptions about the deaf -- that they were somehow capable of less.

Hottle had been taking extensive one-on-one sign language classes for two weeks. At night, he'd sit with a workbook on his lap, practicing signs, teaching his wife the alphabet, figuring out football terms. Still, when he walked into the gym where the team was gathered for that first meeting, he'd arranged for an interpreter to meet him there.

There were 21 guys in the room. He had been expecting around 40.

Some players had skipped the first day of practice, wanting to hear what Hottle was like before they joined the team. Tingley and Coleman held their own meeting right before Hottle's. Coleman had been a star quarterback at Maryland School for the Deaf in Frederick, which won the national deaf prep championship his senior year. He was known for his long-range arm, but Gallaudet had won few games since he'd arrived on campus. The team was more often the laughingstock of the school, and both players were tired of it. "Let's give the coach a chance," Coleman signed.

"All that matters is that we win," Tingley signed back.

After that first practice, Hottle gathered the guys before dismissing them. "We have a lot of work to do to accomplish great things this season," he told them through an interpreter. "Nothing will be easy."

After a few days, the players stopped talking about Hottle's communication challenges. They talked more about how seriously he was taking them. They ran through formations over and over. Exhausted players cringed when they saw Hottle hold his left hand out and sweep his right fingertips over his left palm -- the sign for "again." As the players saw it, Hottle didn't seem to care that they were deaf or that they had only six defensive linemen for the season. He was determined to work with those players until they were the best six defensive linemen the team had ever known.

Hottle was struck by how hard the guys hit in practice. When he mentioned this to an athletic department official, the explanation was simple: The team was proud. The Bison might lose every game, but they wanted everyone to know that deaf football players were tough. After that, Hottle cut out the full-contact tackling in practice.

Another change: Hottle began using a hand-held BlackBerry-like device that no Gallaudet student is without. It's the deaf person's cellphone, allowing instant communication through text messaging. Before long, Hottle's wife had to beg him to put it away. At all hours of the night, his players would text him notes or tidbits about their lives -- one explained why he was sluggish in practice; another shared good news about his grades -- and Hottle always responded. He knew it was an important way to get to know the players and gain their trust.

A few weeks into the season, the size of the team had doubled to 42.

HOTTLE'S SIGNING WAS STILL RUDIMENTARY, but he was finding ways to communicate what he needed to -- before, during and after practice.

Calvin Doudt, a 5-foot-10, 195-pound sophomore linebacker with long golden surfer's locks, and his older brother, Joshua, a 5-foot-11, 240-pound junior linebacker, were lined up with their teammates in the hallway one afternoon.

Hottle often joked that the brothers, who shared a dorm room, also shared a brain -- Calvin and Joshua could read each other's minds on and off the field. Calvin, the most punishing tackler on the team, was quiet, wrote poetry and was a chick magnet. Joshua was a social butterfly. He signed fast, laughed a lot, loved a good joke. Since Calvin was not deaf but hard of hearing, he could hear Hottle when he spoke loudly. Joshua was completely deaf. ("He couldn't hear an ambulance if it was next to him," Calvin says.) Hottle opened the door of the wrestling room, his preferred meeting space, and set up a projector. He motioned for a player to turn off the lights. Game film came on the screen. Hottle pointed to different plays with a red laser, then signed, "Lights on." He wanted to make a point about the defense, but if the lights weren't on, the players couldn't see him signing.

"Remember what we talked about yesterday," Hottle signed. "More aggressive blocks. Defensive ends, you must do a better job. These guys are faster."

Hottle signed, "Lights off," but not all of the guys got the gist of what he'd said.

Joshua looked quizzically at his brother. A couple of other players looked over at Calvin.

Calvin reinterpreted Hottle's signs. Hottle didn't always get it right -- campus interpreters said his language was like a child's. He used incomplete sentences, sometimes a wrong word choice. At the end of last season, he meant to tell the players, "Make sure you get your award." Instead, he signed, "Make sure you get your vagina." The players erupted in laughter.

When Hottle wasn't clear, the players often shot a look at Calvin for translation. During games, it wasn't uncommon for Hottle to be screaming from the sidelines, "Callllllvin!" Most often, Hottle signed plays to the entire team. Other times, when he was angry, he forgot and yelled out the formation, leaving some players unsure about what to do next.

ON THE DAY OF THE 2006 GAME AGAINST SALISBURY STATE'S JV, HOTTLE PACED AN EMPTY FIELD. Game days often made him think of his father, Edward Hottle Sr., a Fairfax County police officer who divorced his mother when Hottle was 16. His father had coached him in rec leagues and was proud of his son when he went on to become a nose guard at Frostburg State -- the place where Hottle got his first assistant coaching job. Hottle often wears a silver whistle on a cord around his neck. After his father died on Good Friday in 2005, it was the only thing Ed Hottle Jr. took from his father's house.

The Salisbury State players unloaded their gear near the tailgating grills. Gallaudet's cheerleaders were practicing on the sidelines. They kicked and clapped in sync, moving to an internal, inaudible beat.

"Seventeen minutes left," Calvin Doudt signed to his teammates back in the locker room. The team was nervous.

Coleman was used to the anxiety. Since the Bison had started winning, he'd become a bit of a celebrity on campus. He swaggered to class, often wearing perfectly pressed warm-up suits. But teammates said he was quiet and didn't let people really get to know him. He always sat in the back of the team bus and stood during meetings while everyone else sat. That morning, he wrote on the blackboard, "Eat Them Alive."

Game days were always emotional. Many Gallaudet players had lots of pent-up frustration and baggage they carried from the past: the middle school bully who screamed the name of the unaware deaf kid to the amusement of others; the high school coach who kept the deaf player out of games because he didn't want to deal with the communication challenges. But when that deaf player got to Gallaudet, the stigma was gone, even if those scars lingered. On the field, the players' fury unfurled. The Bison said they relished the moment they could wrap their arms around a hearing player's chest and toss him backward.

Before kickoff, Hottle reminded the referees that because his players couldn't hear the whistle, they didn't always know when a play was dead. They might tackle their opponent anyway, resulting in a penalty. "You have to get up close to them," Hottle told the refs. "They need to see the signals."

THE BISON PLAY FOOTBALL WITH THEIR EYES. Joshua Doudt calls it "swivel-head," where players constantly turn their heads from side to side and scan the field. If you don't, he says, you'll get popped.

"You can feel the thud of a tackle," says Calvin, through an interpreter. "But you're more seeing the thud. You see the helmets hitting. You see the tackles. You see the pain and the anger. We don't know what sounds we're missing -- we've never known them."

The team doesn't huddle up, even though Gallaudet invented the huddle in the 1890s to keep opponents from reading its signs. Today the players sign openly to one another, assuming that their opponents won't know enough of the language to understand.

Coleman leads the offense to the line and crouches behind center Justin Lathus. There is no snap count. Coleman leans on Lathus's thigh ever so slightly to signal that he is ready. The rest of the players don't move until they see the ball snap, which is why Gallaudet has few false-start penalties.

Against Salisbury State, Gallaudet jumped to a 14-point lead, but by halftime, the score was tied, which made Hottle furious. On the way into the locker room, he was gritting his teeth and cursing. Some of the players read his lips.

Once inside the locker room, Coleman signed angrily at a few players, but Hottle came in looking calm. "We're okay," he signed. He took out a dry erase board and went over the defensive strategy, saying how much more aggressive the defensive end needed to be. "It's easy," he signed. "It's just like we did in practice. Nothing's changed." He paused. "Hold your head up."

Gallaudet played tighter in the second half. The crowd stomped its feet on the bleachers, hoping to inspire the Bison with the vibrations. Gallaudet scored one touchdown, then another. The final score was 28-14.

After the win, Coleman gathered his teammates at the far end of the field. The players got down on one knee, holding their helmets. "I got frustrated earlier because I knew we could play better," Coleman signed. "Everybody, look up."

He waited until the guys were staring at the drizzling gray sky. Then he waved his hand to get their attention. "With this team," he signed, "there are no limits."

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SEASON, Hottle assigned J.J. Damas -- the team's only hearing player, who learned sign language from his deaf parents -- to a starting defensive end position. The decision raised concern among some players. Was Damas given the position because he could hear the coach?

Hottle had told the team that he chose the best player for each position, that his selections had nothing to do with hearing status. But players had also noticed that three out of the four captains were hard of hearing, with only one, Coleman, deaf-deaf, or truly deaf.

"The deaf-deaf can't have that verbal communication about a play, ask a question or express a concern," said Tingley, explaining why some of his teammates were upset. The coach might not always understand what they were saying, or vice versa. "They get frustrated and start to feel inferior. A hard-of-hearing athlete has more access to coach."

On the field, the guys said, they were brothers, but off the field, differences divided them. Last year, for example, there were more players on the team who'd been "mainstreamed," meaning they were educated in their local public schools, where the majority of deaf students today are educated. Students from mainstream schools, such as Tingley, were taught primarily how to communicate in a hearing world. In those situations, deafness could be treated as something to overcome, and many students learned to read lips and speak, even if they couldn't hear their own voice.

Coleman came from a high school for the deaf. Students at deaf-only schools were educated exclusively in American Sign Language, so that they could communicate fully and freely. Deafness was celebrated. Because many of the deaf-only high schools play one another in sports, Gallaudet athletes know many of their teammates.

Mainstreamed students sometimes arrive as freshmen and feel alone because they don't speak the dominant language. Tingley didn't learn a word of American Sign Language in the public schools in Upstate New York. Early on at Gallaudet, he couldn't communicate with most students. He was depressed, he said, until he joined the team. Playing football helped him make friends with people who were more likely to put their backgrounds aside, and they helped him learn sign language.

ONE AFTERNOON, A COUPLE OF HOURS BEFORE A PRACTICE LAST FALL, Coleman went in to talk to Hottle. The two knew little about each other's personal lives -- Hottle said much of the life-lesson conversations that he was used to having in his other coaching positions had been lost here because he was not fluent in American Sign Language. Still, Coleman often e-mailed Hottle analysis of what was working in practice and what wasn't, and Hottle often listened. The two would chat online about college football games, and Hottle sometimes asked Coleman what was going on with certain players. Coleman's dream was to one day replace Hottle as Gallaudet's coach.

On this afternoon, Coleman was delivering a warning. "They're saying that you favor the hard-of-hearing kids," he signed to the coach. "You're playing them more than the deaf kids."

At that day's practice, Hottle couldn't get the accusation out of his head. He called over his co-captains, told them he was tired of players thinking that they were owed playing time and didn't have to earn it. Then he sulked off the field. He returned to practice half an hour later and didn't address the accusations directly. But for the rest of the season, he would yell at anyone who forgot to sign, especially Damas, the hearing player.

"This is a deaf university," he signed to Damas one afternoon when he knew many of the guys were watching. "Stop talking -- sign."

IT WAS POURING RAIN WHEN THE PLAYERS BOARDED THE BUS FOR WORCESTER, MASS., EARLY LAST OCTOBER. TV camera crews were waiting at the school's entrance. They were there for the live 6 a.m. news because students had planned protests against Gallaudet's president-designate Jane Fernandes.

Gallaudet had played mostly JV teams this season, and Becker College, a small school in Worcester, was one of two NCAA Division III teams on the 2006 schedule. A win here would be Gallaudet's 13th straight victory and further demonstrate its readiness for Division III varsity status in 2007. Before the trip, Hottle gave out navy blue T-shirts he had made that read: MAKE A STATEMENT.

The bus pulled into a truck stop in Connecticut, where some players walked over to a Wendy's restaurant. At the counter, one by one, they held up six fingers for a No. 6 meal, pointed to the beverage-menu emblems to indicate they wanted fruit punch or made a dipping motion to get sauce for chicken nuggets. Tingley ordered for Phil Endicott, an offensive lineman. Endicott could speak, but he was self-conscious.

"I can't really pronounce words right," he said, "so I feel dumb."

One player wrote "8 frostee" on a piece of paper, for the No. 8 combo meal.

"You want eight Frosties?" the cashier said.

The player looked confused. He didn't understand what the cashier was saying.

"I don't know what you want," the cashier said. She wiped her brow and looked at him impatiently. The player turned to an assistant coach for help.

Coleman coolly typed his order on his hand-held device and held it up to the cashier: "one bacon cheeseburger. fries. thanks."

Once in Massachusetts, the team checked into a drab hotel across the street from a Staples. In the morning, Hottle woke the players one by one with a gentle shake, because they can't hear a wake-up call. At home, they are awakened by devices they put under their pillows that vibrate when it is time to get up.

After breakfast, they headed over to Becker College's Foley Stadium, an aging tan-and-green structure surrounded by a chain-link fence with barbed wire on top. The field was muddy. When the guys went inside to change, Hottle began pacing.

"He's always so nervous," his mother, Terry Desilets, said, watching him from the sidelines. She attended every game. "The way he's walking is the way his father would walk -- arms crossed, lips tense, analyzing the situation. When his father died, he gave a speech. He said that he often wondered why his father was so hard on him, but now he knew. He was preparing him for a day like that one."

Gallaudet's offense struggled from the start. Coleman was sacked repeatedly.

Because Becker was stacking up on the inside, Hottle had his players run outside. Becker stopped them there, too.

Becker scored a touchdown. Then a second one. Before the end of the first half, Becker put in its second-string defense.

"That's how serious they're taking us," Hottle told an assistant coach.

Then Becker scored a third time.

At halftime, the Gallaudet team returned to the locker room, fists slamming into lockers, everyone blaming someone else. Coleman signed furiously to teammates. Hottle came in and told them to stop talking -- the game was not over. As soon as he walked out, Coleman was back on his feet, eyes narrowed, venting his frustration about the plays they'd been running.

Hottle popped his head in and asked Coleman to help review offensive strategies. Once outside, Coleman was still agitated, so Hottle motioned for his wife to come down from the stands. He pulled his 3-year-old daughter, Madalynn, from his wife's arms and put her in Coleman's. "Babies are soothing," he told Coleman. "Relax."

IN THE SECOND HALF, GALLAUDET BEGAN TO FIND ITS RHYTHM. Becker brought many starters back into the game. With three minutes left in the third quarter, Gallaudet scored its first touchdown. "We're coming back," Tingley signed. "I know it."

A minute later, Gallaudet intercepted a pass. Then, in the fourth quarter, Coleman connected on a pass to Becker's 1-yard line. A few plays later, Gallaudet scored and made a two-point conversion, cutting the deficit to 18-15.

As the Bison closed in, tension on the field intensified. One Becker player told the Gallaudet players "to put their hearing aids back in." Another grabbed a Gallaudet player's face mask and head-butted him.

With less than two minutes left in the game and the 12-game winning streak on the line, Coleman led the Bison on a seven-play, 47-yard drive that stalled on the Becker 9-yard line on fourth down with three yards to go for a first down. Hottle found himself with a choice -- kick a field goal to tie, or go for it on fourth down. Gallaudet kicker Justin Wilson was nursing a broken finger on the sidelines. Hottle asked him if he could kick, and Wilson said he wasn't sure. His legs were fine, but he was woozy from the pain. Hottle masked his irritation.

"We're going to win it right here," he said, directing his offense back onto the field. Players on the Gallaudet bench grabbed hold of one another's hands.

The ball was snapped. Coleman handed off to running back Robert Haney. Haney put his head down and charged into the line, close to the first down. Everyone was quiet as the chain gang was sent out. They lined up their poles, pulling the chain taut.

The Becker players erupted in cheers. Gallaudet had come up inches short of the first down. Coleman collapsed onto the ground. Tears began streaming down Tingley's face. "We could have kicked a field goal," Tingley signed to a teammate.

After the Bison showered and changed, they were particularly subdued, but Coleman tried to see the situation in a different light. He signed to a teammate: "Losing this game was a monkey off our back. We won't feel the pressure anymore. We can just play football."

THE TEAM RETURNED FROM WORCESTER TO A CAMPUS FRAUGHT WITH TENSION. Student protesters had shut down the university's main academic building, eventually forcing the administration to cancel classes for several days. The protesters wanted president-designate Fernandes to resign, and they showed little interest in negotiating. They had a list of complaints: She was cold; graduation rates had plummeted on her watch as Gallaudet's provost; she'd hired too many professors who didn't know sign language.

A few nights later, Coleman called a team meeting. He said he was fed up with Fernandes. He was growing impatient with the protests, and he wanted classes reopened. Protesters had talked about extending the blockade to campus entrances, but Coleman wasn't sure they'd pull it off. He had a hunch that if the football team got involved, and shut down the entrances, the administration would force Fernandes to resign -- because no one would be able to get on or off campus otherwise. A majority of the players said they'd help. Many were still angry at Fernandes for requiring some players to perform community service for tearing down the goal posts after the 2005 undefeated season.

Before dawn, Coleman and 20 other players held hands and walked to the campus entrance, just off Florida Avenue NE, and linked arms in a human chain. No traffic could get into or out of the university. Television and newspaper reporters were using interpreters to interview students.

Coleman peered through the gates, wearing the MAKE A STATEMENT T-shirt that Hottle had handed out. Hottle, who was blocked from entering the campus by protesters, yelled to Coleman through the gate, telling him to read the playbook for the upcoming weekend's home game -- though it seemed likely the game would be called off. Coleman apologized that he couldn't let him through.

"If you need me, page me," Hottle signed. The words came fast to him now.

In the weeks leading up to the protest, president-designate Fernandes had shown interest in the team. She attended home games. She told the athletic director that she believed the team was an important recruiting tool. She promised that she'd increase funding, enough so that Hottle would be able to buy new uniforms and equipment, and hire a full-time assistant. If Fernandes resigned, Hottle knew, the athletic department would have to build a relationship with a new president from scratch. He didn't think Coleman had considered that when he led the team in protest.

Hottle went back to watching the protest from an assistant coach's front porch across the street. Practice was canceled that day and again the next. When it seemed certain that the weekend's game would be called off, too, Coleman found Hottle to gauge his reaction. The players weren't sure whether he was going to be angry or understanding. "My dad always told me, 'You have to finish what you started,'" Hottle told him. "Go finish what you started."

A few days later, Coleman paraded into Hottle's office wearing diamonds in his ears, a Redskins hat turned sideways and a white T-shirt with 720600540 written on it in black Magic Marker. It was the booking number from his arrest for disorderly conduct two nights earlier -- the night before the canceled game. Then he held up a white sign he had been carrying around with him. It read: FINISH WHAT YOU STARTED!

AFTER THE ARRESTS, PROTESTERS AGREED TO OPEN ONE CAMPUS ENTRANCE SO CLASSES COULD RESUME. Practice resumed, too, just in time for the following weekend's homecoming game against Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a club team.

Tingley was upbeat now, but he had been feeling down since the protests -- his final football season was being stolen from him, he said. After one game was canceled, he worried that the team would have to miss another.

"Fruitcake," Tingley signed and yelled to Hottle when he started a meeting one day. Hottle laughed, which made the players cheer -- they liked seeing his expression change from stern to silly, and they especially liked it when he picked up on their lingo. They'd taught Hottle the sign for "fruitcake" at the beginning of the season after he heard them calling one another the name. Over time, Hottle started calling the players "fruits" if they made him laugh or made him proud. The word had become a term of endearment.

"My daughter learned a new sign this weekend," Hottle signed back. "Fruit."

The players erupted in laughter.

"Let's talk about this week," Hottle signed. "Walter Reed is a good team. They want to win. But the situation is not good with the protest. You must make sure that you eat and sleep. No hunger strike. Right, Calvin?"

Calvin nodded.

"If the faculty's holding classes," he signed, "you must show up."

"How do we concentrate?" one player asked.

"I need you for 2 1/2 hours every day. That's all. Don't think about the protests. See you on the field."

TWO DAYS BEFORE THE WALTER REED GAME, Hottle learned that the university president had canceled all on-campus homecoming events. The administration was trying to prevent large numbers of protesting alumni from taking over campus. Still, Hottle was determined to find another field for the team to play on, and he'd told the players so. He had already called coaches at Catholic University, the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, St. John's College High School, Bowie State and local public high schools, but no one had called back.

"The University of Maryland said no," said athletic director DeStefano as he walked into Hottle's office. "I don't think we're going to find a place to play."

"Then you can tell the team," Hottle yelled. "I'm not [expletive] telling them because it makes me look like a liar."

"People don't want us, Jimmy," Hottle went on. "They've seen the news. They don't want this mess coming to their school."

Finally, DeStefano managed to get the Maryland School for the Deaf's field in Frederick. There, during warm-ups, the bass drum rang out. And at the homecoming dance later that night, the team celebrated its 49-0 victory.

While the players were being taped for the final game of last season, a 21-20 loss to the Bridgewater College JV that would give the Bison a 6-2 record, Hottle stood outside with a lump of tobacco tucked under his lower lip. He told his assistant coaches about next season's schedule. Newly reinstated as an NCAA Division III program, the probation sanction notwithstanding, Gallaudet will play 10 games, eight against Division III schools. An assistant coach asked Hottle how many games he thought the team would win.

"Every one," he said.

The assistants broke out in laughter, but Hottle wasn't joking.

Brooke Foster is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine. She can be reached at brookeleafoster@yahoo.com.