Starting safety Dahna Deleston almost wasn’t a part of the team this year. He became academically ineligible after the fall semester and was thrown out of school for his academic woes. After going to school in the spring on his own dime and also summer school, Deleston worked his way back into school.
“My first thought was that I had to get myself back,” he said. “I came back here and took some classes; I earned A’s and B’s in those. I took another summer class and I had to get a C+ in that to get back, and I ended up getting a B in that one.”
“He learned a lesson,” Edsall said. “It was a [mistake] that I hope he won’t make again. I think he’s grown up a lot through all of this. He knew what he needed to do. He needed to prove that it was important to him. He did that. We were always there for him. … He held up to his end and we held up to our end. Sometimes kids have to fail to move ahead. He had to fail a little bit to learn just how important his education and how important playing football was to him.”
Head Coach Randy Edsall wasn’t happy with the effort his team put forth during Saturday’s practice and even called out of the one of the defensive leaders, Dan Davis.
“One thing we try to do is that we don’t want it to get to the point where the coaches are the ones pointing it out to us,” Davis said. “We want to be able to police and govern ourselves before they get to us. One thing we have to try to do as captains and leaders is govern ourselves. The coaches shouldn’t have to tell us we’re not pulling our weight. It shouldn’t get to that point. That’s a wake-up call for us.
Edsall is also in no rush to make a decision as to who will be the starting quarterback for the season opener at Duke on September 1st. Dennis Brown, Tyler Lorenzen and Cody Endres are all competing for the job with Endres on the outside looking in.
“If there’s a time when we can make a decision, we’ll make a decision,” Edsall said Saturday. “Whether that’s next week or it’s the week before [the first game] or whatever, that’s when it will be. There’s no hurry to it. There’s a lot of evaluation that has to take place and I want to make sure that we’re giving it the justice that it deserves.”
It should be an interesting race as Brown has played in a few games already while Lorenzen comes in as much heralded JUCO transfer.
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