The Handshake

The day Deacon Sterna walked into the gym, he couldn’t look me in the eye.

He spoke maybe ten words. “Thank you” was two of them. His handshake was barely there — not because he didn’t care, but because he was so shy the act of meeting someone new took everything he had. He was in Grade 9. It was 2021, things were just starting to open up after the COVID lockdowns, and this tall, quiet kid showed up with a broken elbow he was still recovering from and a hockey career that had just come apart.

He’d been cut from the AAA team. Most kids in that situation go find another hockey program or quietly drift away from competitive sport altogether. Deacon’s family brought him to us.

He was about 160 lbs. Tall. Weak. His core was so undeveloped he couldn’t hold a plank for 20 seconds without his back collapsing.

But I noticed two things about him immediately.

He had enormous hands. And enormous feet.

I remember looking at them and thinking: That’s interesting. What is this kid going to grow into?

Grade 9. 160 lbs. Shy, quiet, and hiding a football player nobody knew was there yet.

Year One — Fix the Foundation

We didn’t do anything fancy. Couldn’t. His elbow was healing, his body wasn’t ready for load, and his movement quality was exactly what you’d expect from a tall teenager who had never been properly trained.

So we went back to the beginning. Pure bodyweight. Plank progressions. Basic hinge patterns. Teaching his body how to stabilize before we asked it to produce any force. No weights. No glamour. Just control.

He played community hockey that year while his elbow healed. Nothing special happened on the ice. But something was happening in the gym.

He kept coming back.

Every session. On time. Did everything I asked. Tried hard. Didn’t complain. Didn’t ask when he’d get to the “real stuff.” Just showed up and worked.

Over the months he started to get stronger. And then — bigger. His body responded to training in a way you don’t see often. The muscle started to come, and once it started, it didn’t stop. Those huge hands and feet made sense now. His frame was built for size. It just needed someone to ask it to grow.

The Wrong Sports

Grade 10. Deacon decided to play both basketball and hockey. He was bigger, stronger, more confident than the year before. Two sports felt like the right move.

He hated both.

Not the kind of hate where you complain but keep going. The kind where the sport just doesn’t fit the person. He wasn’t meant for the finesse of basketball or the politics of hockey at that level. He stopped playing both.

And that’s when I started to see it.

Underneath the shyness — underneath the uncertainty and the quiet voice and the eyes that still sometimes looked at the floor — there was a football player lurking. Waiting in the shadows. I could see it in the way he moved when he wasn’t thinking. The way his body had filled out. The way he hit things in training when we let him. There was a violence in there, buried under all that gentleness, and it needed somewhere to go.

He made the switch. Started playing football as a wide receiver in Grade 11. This is exactly the kind of sport-switching that the development window is designed for — finding the right fit before the body is locked in.

The Moment Everything Changed

Summer before Grade 12. I had a few defensive football players out in the field working on pass rush moves. Technique drills, hand fighting, edge work. Standard stuff for d-linemen getting ready for the season.

On a whim, I invited Deacon out.

He’d been playing receiver. He was fast enough, physical enough, but something about it never quite clicked. He was a square peg being polished into a round hole.

He tried a few pass rush drills. Got his hands on the edge. Worked a bull rush. Bent the corner.

Every single person on that field knew instantly.

This kid is a defensive end.

Not a receiver. Not a tight end. A defensive end. The position might as well have been invented for his body — the length, the hands, the feet, the raw power he’d built over three years of training. It was so obvious that the only question was why nobody had seen it sooner.

We never moved him back.

Grade 12 — Domination

He trained as a defensive end that entire summer. We flipped everything. Velocity-based training. Explosive first-step work. Pass rush technique integrated into his strength sessions. The body we’d spent three years building finally had a purpose it was designed for.

His Grade 12 season, he played both ways and dominated. Not “played well for a kid who just switched positions” dominated. Dominated. The kind of season where every Canadian university starts calling.

And they did. Every one of them wanted him.

He chose UBC Thunderbirds. At the very last minute, as Deacon does things — quietly, on his own timeline, with zero fanfare.

The First Quarter

When Deacon showed up at UBC training camp, he did so well that they didn’t redshirt him. If you don’t follow university football — that’s unusual. Most true freshmen spend their first year watching. Learning the system. Getting bigger. They don’t dress. They don’t play.

Deacon dressed.

Char, our daughter Aurelia, and I travelled to Vancouver for his first game. We were in the stands. First quarter. The coaches substituted him in for another defensive end.

He never came out.

Not that quarter. Not that game. Not that season. From the moment he stepped onto that field as a true freshman at 17 years old, the job was his. He started every game. He was relentless against the pass and the run. He played with the kind of controlled fury that coaches dream about — the shyness that used to keep him from making eye contact had transformed into something else entirely on the field.

At the end of the season: Canada West Rookie of the Year. Finalist for USports Rookie of the Year — the award for the best first-year football player in all of Canadian university football. He tied for the Canada West sacks lead with four, posted 20 tackles, and led the Thunderbirds in tackles for loss with seven.

The kid who couldn’t hold a plank for 20 seconds.

Starting defensive end. UBC Thunderbirds. Canada West Rookie of the Year. Same kid.

The Off-Season — Building the Next Version

After that first season, Deacon needed ankle surgery and elbow surgery. The same elbow, in fact, that was broken when he first walked into our gym in Grade 9. The body that had carried him through a dominant rookie season needed repair.

Most programs would have shut him down. Waited. Let him “rest and recover” until he was cleared, then started from scratch.

We worked around it. Unconventional methods — finding every angle we could load without stressing the surgical sites. Training what we could train. Refusing to let months go to waste just because two joints needed healing.

He started that off-season at 208 lbs. By the time he was done, he was 240.

Thirty-two pounds of muscle added while rehabbing two surgeries. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the kid refuses to stop and the coaching knows how to navigate around the obstacles.

Where He Is Now

Deacon is heading into his third season at UBC at 6’4″, 240 lbs. He’s powerful against the pass and the run. He’s already had a season opener interception against the No. 8-ranked Manitoba Bisons. People have started to notice — NCAA programs are paying attention.

We’re still working. Still finding the weaknesses. Still building him into a more explosive, more dynamic player. The foundation is there. The frame is there. The mentality has been there since day one — since the kid who couldn’t look me in the eye showed up every single session and did everything I asked without complaint.

The sky is genuinely the limit for this kid.

What This Means for Your Athlete

Deacon didn’t walk in as a football player. He walked in as a shy, injured, 160 lb hockey player who’d just been cut. He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t have a position. He didn’t have confidence.

What he had was time, the right order of development, and a coach who understood sensitive periods.

Grade 9 to university starter isn’t a straight line. It’s a winding, confusing, sometimes painful process of building the body first and letting the sport find the athlete — not the other way around.

Most parents try to force-fit their kid into a sport and then build the body around it. We built the body. The sport revealed itself. And when it did, the body was ready.

If your athlete is young, if they’re still figuring out who they are and what they’re built for — that’s not a problem. That’s an opportunity. The window is open. The body is ready to be shaped. And sometimes the sport your kid is meant to play hasn’t even occurred to them yet.