Basketball, admitted Dorson Boyce, was the sport everyone played while growing up in Queens and Brooklyn.
Boyce, however, has been playing football since he was 7. He said he played both sports in high school, but ultimately bucking tradition by just playing football seems to have been a smart move: Come March, Boyce will be attending the University of Washington. This Allan Hancock College graduate who grew up playing football in a basketball town will next be playing tight end in the Pac-10.
Picking a countercultural sport isn’t the only unique thing about Boyce. The 20-year-old, the youngest of
four siblings, broke ground in his family by earning an associate’s degree and planning to pursue his bachelor’s
in business. Still, Boyce is honest about his high school academic record.
“I really did poor in high school,” he said, “so a junior college was my only choice.”
And he didn’t pick just any junior college. He settled on one in a small farming town that’s about as far from the city as it gets. What was it like coming from Queens to Santa Maria?
“It was really a culture shock,” he said. “Not much to do but focus on school and sports.”
That situation, Boyce said, was probably for the best: “It really happened to pay off.”
It goes without saying that Boyce was an exceptional athlete from the get go, but what was his secret to turning his grades around once he got to Hancock? Boyce said it was a helluva mix of his mom, coach, personal injury, and personal tragedy.
Boyce suffered a shoulder injury in his second season, and last year his roommate and fellow teammate Tau Sudlow was shot and killed in Santa Maria.
Boyce says the loss was devastating, but he came away from it with a renewed determination.
“We pretty much came from the same place,” he said. “He was a city boy, too, from Brooklyn. It was too much to go through at the time, but it gave me the inspiration to push myself. I dedicated my season and classroom to him.”
That he even had a season to dedicate to Sudlow was a feat in itself. Because of the shoulder injury, Boyce spent an entire season on the bench. That, Boyce said,
was a long year.
“Actually, I really thought about quitting,” he said. “I was like, man, this may not be the right route I should take.”
In the end, Boyce said, the break made him both a better person and a better player. Mom helped too.
“She would tell me, ‘Don’t get heartbroken if it doesn’t work out,’” he said. “She supports me in everything I do, but my mom is going to be a mom first. She wants me to finish up school. The football thing, well … .”
He trailed off with a laugh, adding that she sees football as a means to an end.
“She’s always said, ‘You get an associate’s, move on to a four-year,” he said. “‘That’s what I really want for you.’”
With her son transferring to U of W on a full ride scholarship in March, Boyce’s mom is getting her wish. Getting there, Boyce said, has been in no small part thanks to Allan Hancock College football coach Kris Dutra.
“He stood on top of me to make sure I got everything done in the classroom and the weight room,” Boyce said. “He made sure I would be a good student first and an athlete second.”
Coach Dutra is unabashed in his admiration for Boyce.
“He fits our school motto: ‘Start here, go anywhere,’” Dutra said. “He didn’t have [recruiters] banging down his door in high school. Everyone told him he wasn’t tall enough.”
In fact, Dutra sees Boyce’s experience as an example of “what community college can do for a young person nowadays.”
“If they handle things properly, they will open a lot of doors,” the coach said.
Dutra added that Boyce knew what he had to do coming in: Get field time.
“He took a look at what we do offensively,” Dutra said. “We run the ball a lot, and we play action pass. Teams that do that have to have a good tight end.”
The Bulldogs certainly had that in Boyce. While he may not have led the team in rushing, it’s because of him that the Bulldogs led the state in rushing yards last season.
So ultimately, how does a kid from Queens end up playing for a junior college in an agricultural area anyway? Dutra laughed when asked where he found Boyce.
“I’d like to take credit for finding him, like a diamond in the rough,” the coach said. “But it just didn’t happen that way. Dorson just kinda fell into my lap.”
Looking back on the three years he’s known the football player, thinking about everything he’s gone through, Dutra expressed admiration for his student athlete.
“I have not met very many people that are as mentally tough as this kid, at any age,” Dutra said.
Contributor Nicholas Walter leads the Santa Maria Sun office in rushing. Send him comments through the executive editor at rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 5-12, 2009.
