Completed Event: Football at Fordham on October 18, 2025 , Win , 30, to, 13
Final
Football
at Fordham
30
13
Drive and Dete-rmination
9/30/2008 12:00:00 AM | Football
By Bruce Wood
Senior linebacker Andrew Dete didn't really pump iron alongside Bishops and Cardinals in a secret weight room hidden in the basement of the Vatican. He did not have a private mass with the Pope, nor did he once trade small talk with the Prime Minister of Italy.
He doesn't have a 4.0 grade point average at Dartmouth, he hasn't started every game of his Big Green career and he hasn't won every award the football program gives out.
All those stories are exaggerated.
A little.
Ask Andrew Dete how much sleep he gets each night and he'll do what he frequently does when you ask him about himself. The 6-foot, 230-pound Dartmouth tri-captain from Marietta, Ga., will answer politely and candidly that during the season he may not hit the sack until 2 or 2:30 in the morning. And then he'll try hard to make sure you don't think he's doing anything special.
But he is, of course.
Dete treats every day the way he treats his Dartmouth Experience. The way he treats opposing ball carriers. He tries to squeeze everything out of them. Whether it is in the college community or in a world far removed from the isolated and insulated Hanover Plain.
That's only one reason why a kid who wasn't sure Dartmouth was the right place for himself before making it his college choice four years ago is now the perfect ambassador not just for the college, but for all of the college's fellow student-athletes.
“I'm not sure we always capture how special and unique Dartmouth is,” he opined while sitting the in the Memorial Field grandstand one sunny afternoon during the preseason. “I feel strongly about that. It's unique and self-selecting. The guys who come here want to be here and want to be involved in what this place has to offer. There's something very rugged and hard-working about this place. That's what I love. That I've come here and been pushed by my friends and my coaches, in the classroom and by everyone in every different way.
“It's hard to compare what it's like here to other teams, other leagues and other schools, but people always ask me if I'd rather be at a bigger school playing in one of those bigger stadiums. That would be cool, but it seems somewhat transitory compared to the amazing experience it has been to be here.”
The startling thing is that Dete almost didn't come to Dartmouth at all. First contacted by a lame-duck coach held over from the previous staff before Buddy Teevens came back to Dartmouth, Dete initially had misgivings about the college.
“It wasn't exactly what I saw myself doing,” he said. “I knew Dartmouth was a great school with a great reputation, but I didn't really know what Dartmouth was and why it was so special. Why it would become so special to me. So I said I don't think so.
“I took some visits to other schools but didn't feel right with them. One of my old coaches stayed in contact and when Coach Teevens was hired I got another call. I thought he sounded like a great guy. It definitely sparked my interest. I said all right I'll come up and it was like the clich? story. You get up here and you feel like you fit right in.”
And he did fit right in on the football field, thanks in part, he'll be sure to tell you, because of the coaching he got a Marist.
As an outside linebacker, Dete had a tackle for loss in just his second college game, moved into the starting lineup by midseason and finished the year as the winner of the Earl Hamilton Freshman Award for his contributions to the varsity team.
Getting on the field and having success that year remains particularly meaningful for Dete, whose father, Leo, would die in April of his freshman year, one day before his son would turn 19.
“My dad had been diagnosed that summer and he was coming to games,” Dete said. “For me to be playing a little bit and for him to be able to see it was special.”
So was what happened after his father died, which forever sealed the young man's love affair with Dartmouth and Dartmouth College football. Teevens and couple of his teammates made the somber trip to Georgia to support Dete and his family.
“I think that was probably my first taste of what it's like to be at Dartmouth and to be part of this community,” he said. “I hadn't been to school that long and then I stand up to give the eulogy and I look to the back and Coach Teevens and Andrew von Kuhn and Phil Galligan were standing there. I knew they were coming but I hadn't seen them before. It was a really powerful thing to see Coach Teevens take the trouble to come down with those guys to be with my family and come to my house afterwards and be so nice to my mom.
“Coach Teevens stresses that he's preparing us for more than football. That's how he sees his job. For me, that was the moment. That speaks to me on such a higher level than football. It's a commitment to each other and a commitment to what you are working toward.”
It was also a moment of clarity for Teevens, who lost his own father while a Dartmouth student-athlete.
“To see him eulogize his dad and how well he did it was overwhelming,” said Teevens. “It was eloquent and thoughtful, witty and humorous. That told me a lot about him.
“He's been what you hoped a guy would be. He excels in the classroom. He's respected socially and publicly. He plays his heart out on the football field and is a great mentor to the younger kids and a great leader to the older players. There's a passion in everything he does. He's kind of a unique guy. He's mature beyond his years but hasn't lost his useful enthusiasm for life.” After posting 54 tackles in his second season, Dete won Dartmouth's Doten Award, given to a sophomore who made a significant contribution to the team. Last spring he won football's inaugural Charles (Stubby) Pearson '42 Award recognizing an underclassman for character, leadership on campus, high academic standing and performance. The holder of a 3.74 grade point average also claimed the college's Class of 1948 Scholar-Athlete Award, presented annually to one male and female member of the junior class and was elected a team captain.
As a senior, Dete is president of Aquinas House, Dartmouth's Catholic Student Center. A person of strong faith, he has spent two terms abroad, first studying Italian in a Language Study Abroad program and serving last winter as a state department intern at the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See in Rome.
“ I just wanted to be around that,” he said of the capital of Catholicism. “I don't know where I see myself after college, but I wanted to immerse myself in that world a little bit and see what I thought. It was an unbelievable experience.”
That experience included an Ash Wednesday mass at a small church with the Pope in attendance. A prime seat in a balcony for Easter mass at St. Peter's Square. Receiving communion from the Cardinal Secretary of State. Sitting “three or four” seats away from the Prime Minister of Italy while helping represent the United States at a funeral. Sending cables back to Washington with his research on the Swiss Guards and the history of the U.S.-Holy See relations.
Oh, and lifting weights, not alongside any Cardinals, but perhaps a few Quakers. “They had a full gym in the embassy and I'd go over there every day after work,” he said. “I was always going in my gear with my number and I'd hear about it from guys who went to Penn or Harvard or one of the other schools.”
Dete isn't sure yet what he will be doing next year. His brother Brendan, co-Pioneer Football League defensive player of the year as a senior in 2004 and someone Dete unabashedly calls his hero, went to work at Lehman Brothers after graduating with honors from Davidson. The younger brother worked at Lehman over the summer and has an offer to return. Or he could turn his sights back to the world stage, whetted by his experiences at the Embassy.
“They are doing a lot of work on human trafficking right now,” he said. “They do a lot of work on AIDS prevention and all sorts of development-related stuff, which kind of ties in with my focus in my economics major, so I don't know.
“I have a lot of good options. I'm kind of taking this fall to think it through. It's like choosing a college. You've got to jump in somewhere. Hopefully I'll have a similar experience to when I chose to go to Dartmouth because that couldn't have turned out better.”
A veteran writer and observer of Dartmouth athletics, Bruce Wood launched a web site in 2005, www.biggreenalert.com, specializing in Big Green football news coverage.
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