Evan Ditchman: Jack-of-all-Trades for Football Behind the Scenes

Dartmouth football uses the Catapult GPS system to track player speed and endurance. Evan Ditchman has never worn one, but maybe he should.

"I think I move around a lot, but that dude is in hyperspeed," said an admiring Buddy Teevens, the Robert L. Blackman Head Football Coach. "He's always on the move, and wherever he goes, he sprints."

Here's the thing. Evan Ditchman isn't on the Dartmouth team.

No, that's not right. He is on the team but he's not a player.

The senior from the Cleveland suburbs has been a manager/gofer/operations assistant/cameraman/undergraduate coach since stepping on campus. In the parlance of baseball, he's been the ultimate five-tool guy for the Dartmouth football program.

"He's been tremendous for us," said Teevens. "He is one of the smartest human beings I've ever worked with, and yet there's nothing too small for him to do. He is thoughtful. He is supportive. He'll do anything you ask, and he does it for nothing. Just the love of the game."

For love of a game that, Teevens could have added, might have cost him his life.

As a sophomore linebacker at The Hawken School, Ditchman posted a team-high 136 tackles while earning a spot on the All-Northeast District second team. A year later he was also seeing time at running back for a team that six weeks into the season was bidding for its first win. With 10:50 left in the first half of what would indeed be their first victory of the season, he took a handoff, made a nifty cutback and scored a touchdown to give his team a 15-0 lead.

He'd had a headache in the huddle before the play and later said he was confused during the point after. When he left the field after the conversion he did so holding a hand over his eye and shortly thereafter was on the ground, unconscious with team doctors tending to him as he started to seize and labored to breathe.

He was rushed to the hospital where he was found to have suffered a subdural and subarachnoid hemorrhage that required brain surgery.

Starting to come out of a medically induced coma the next day, but unable to speak because he was on a ventilator, he still had football on his mind, scribbling a note asking for his statistics from the game.

In the hours after the ventilator was removed, Ditchman made up for lost time.

"It was miraculous," his mother Clare told Chagrin Valley Today. "When he came out of the sedation, he just talked, and talked, and talked about the game. He was a chatterbox. He wanted to know what happened. It was the answer to our prayers and the prayers of so, so many people."

Ditchman would have a piece of skull that had been removed in surgery replaced in mid-December but was back doing schoolwork within a couple of weeks of his injury, and back in class within a month. He knew he would have to give up playing football, but he wasn't about to give up the game.

"It taught me so many fundamental lessons in life," he said. "I think the lessons I learned playing from grade school on set me up to be able to face the challenges of an unfortunate, one-in-a-million type experience. I love the game because it gives you so many opportunities to embrace who you are, and understand how to face challenges in the real world."

Ditchman helped coach the Hawken linebackers as a senior and knew he wanted to be involved in the game in some way once he got to college.

His final three schools were Dartmouth, Northwestern and the University of Chicago — where his father played football and his maternal great grandfather, Jay Berwanger, won the first Heisman Trophy — and so prior to a visit to Hanover, he touched base with the Big Green football office. "I reached out, shared my story and said I would really love the opportunity to help out in any way I can," he said.

When he visited Dartmouth he had the chance to take in a spring practice, closely watching linebacker coach Don Dobes working with his charges.

"When I sat down with Coach Dobes, I was hooked right there," he said. "That's when I knew this felt like the place I wanted to be."

At Hawken, Ditchman had played under coaches who stressed the value of the life lessons taught by the game, and he feels fortunate to have found a Dartmouth program that embraces the same philosophy.

"I could not be more blessed to be working with coaches who not only care about me, and the players as members of the team, but also as people, as academics, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, spiritual people, whatever it may be," he said. "I really think that Coach T's maxim of being a good football player at football time, a good student at academic time, and a good guy all the time embodies how I feel about football having the power to really build character. I think that is what has made me so passionate about working with the program."

So what exactly does that work entail?

"To put my job, simply," he said, "I do whatever anyone needs me to do. And I think that is really refreshing, because I come in every day not quite knowing what's going to be on my plate. I love the excitement of that."

Ditchman's duties run the gamut.

"The most mundane is probably setting up cameras every day before practice, which is lovely because it's totally mindless," he said. "I get to put my music in for 10 minutes and decompress from classes as I format the (memory) cards, get all the equipment into the camera bags and all the cameras down to the field and set them up.

"That's balanced by one of the coolest opportunities, being up in the box on game day and answering Coach Dobes' questions based on the data I'm taking on the opposing team's offense. Helping give information that informs key game-plan decisions is a huge responsibility. It sometimes amazes me that Coach Dobes has the trust in me that he does."

Watch a practice and the shadow you see following Dobes is Ditchman, soaking in the defensive coordinator's 40-plus years of football knowledge. When one of Dobes' tackling dummies or a mat needs to be moved, the guy they call Ditch is always there. And if he's not, he's running full speed to get there.

It's no accident that he zips around the field the way he does.

"I think it comes from a desire to do things the right way," he said, thinking through why he almost never walks on the field. "I've never been the loudest guy, yelling at everyone. For me it was always leading by example. If I can give 100 percent all the time, even if it's just to the next drill, hopefully I can inspire others to do the same."

Dobes' fondness for Ditchman comes through not just in what he says about his acolyte, but in his voice.

"There's so many life lessons that you try to teach people that can't be taught in any other venue," Dobes said. "It's what makes this game so special. Here's somebody who loves the game so much, and will do anything to give back to a game that created his traumatic injury. He just loves being a team member and loves when I yell at him like any one of the guys."

That's right, Dobes yells at Ditchman, and for a good reason. For the best reason, actually.

"I do it to get him fired up and make sure he knows tough love for him is just as important as it is for the other guys," Dobes said. "I want him to know it's no different than me yelling at Macklin Ayers, or any of the linebackers I've had over the years. I'm gonna treat you the same way. I'm going to love you hard and I'm going to coach you hard and make demands of you. Because that's who you are, and that's what you need.

"You know, he'll come down at halftime with all his spreadsheets and if he doesn't get there quick enough, I'll give him a hard time. I'll tell him 'Hey, man, everybody else was here five minutes ago, man. Let's get moving.' It's part of me just making sure he feels like he's one of the guys."

A self-professed "Lego kid all my life," Ditchman is studying human-centered engineering at Dartmouth and has already accepted a job in Boston with hopes to one day "create solutions for people who experience types of neurological conditions."

At some point, he'd also like to share the lessons he learned at Hawken, at Dartmouth and from the hardship he faced as a result of injury, with another generation of kids playing the game he loves.

"There's something about building a relationship with players that's really special," he said. "I've had the chance to sit in linebacker meetings and see the relationship Coach Dobes cultivates with his players and the other coaches have with players, even those not in their position groups.

"It's been special seeing the care that Coach T has for the players, his curiosity about everyone's life and his desire to see them pursue excellence in all facets of their life. I'd like to have the chance to do that kind of thing and inspire players to be the best versions of themselves they can be."

Before he begins his position in Boston, Dictchman has one more game that will offer Dobes a chance to yell at him and maybe even throw his hat on the ground if he is really lucky.

Dobes, though, is the one who feels lucky to have had Ditchman at his side for every practice since he arrived on campus.

"He's just another blessing that this place has had for me," Dobes said, starting to choke up. "I'm going to miss him. A lot."

Which tells you all you need to know about Ditch.

THE FULL CREW
Evan Ditchman is just one of the Dartmouth students who help keep the Big Green program running. Also doing their part are:

• Rich Lytle, a junior from North Carolina who does filming, operations, equipment and anything else asked of him. His father, Rich '93, was a wide receiver at Dartmouth under Buddy Teevens.
• Max Weintraub, a senior from New Jersey who has the same duties as Lytle and also helps out around the office with analytics.
• Aneesh Sharma, a freshman from Florida jack-of-all managerial trades who hopes one day to be an NFL general manager.
• Ethan Nurre, the senior from Ohio who had to medically retire as an offensive lineman. He helps out the sports medicine staff, films and is involved in operations.
• James McCarthy, a senior from Connecticut who also had to medically retire as an offensive lineman. He works under offensive line coach Keith Clark with an eye toward following his father into the coaching profession.

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