When Dathan Hickey runs out onto the field at the Yale Bowl, which has become a regular thing on glorious autumn Saturdays like this past one, he looks around, looks up in the stands and he sees history.
“It makes me feel blessed, really,” Hickey says. “Just looking around here, you’re going out every game to play for every single person in the room, every single person on the walls, all the trophies, all the championship winners. You’re playing for all of them, 147 years of Yale football, and you’re playing for every single one of them. That’s a great feeling. Sometimes, in a game, I’ll look up in the stands and say, ‘I’m here. … This is where I am.'”
Hickey, three games into his sophomore season, is indeed here, already a mainstay in the secondary for an unbeaten Yale team. But how he got here, from Bristol Central to Yale — that’s the stuff of inspiration.
Because once Dathan Hickey has a goal, he gets a road map and he floors it.
“I sat down and talked to my parents and I told them, ‘I don’t want to transfer. I don’t want to go to a prep school,'” Hickey says, “‘whether I get Division I offers or not. For me to come out of a public school and come here, I just want other kids to know that being an athlete isn’t just being an athlete. It’s on and off the field, how you treat other people, how you work in the classroom. Being a football player should be what you love, but at the end of the day, football ends. Education is the most important thing. Don’t let the sport you play define you.
“And don’t let anybody hold you back. I want to put Bristol on the map as a great town that football players come out of. I know there’s a bunch of young players there that could be as good as me, or better than me in the future, and I just want Bristol Central to have that.”
So here’s how Dathan Hickey got here: After a season on the freshman team at Central, he sent coach Jeff Papazian a text message that has never been deleted from that smart phone:
“Good morning, coach. I know this is a crazy thing to hear in the morning, but a lot of people laugh at me when I say I want to play Division I football. Little do they know, I’m serious. I believe you are one of the people who might take me serious. What do I need to do to get better?”
Papazian gave him the usual answers: Hit the weights; hit the books. The road map. “And he just took it and ran with it,” Papazian says. Soon enough, Hickey was a major part of the Rams on both sides of the ball. Then Yale coach Tony Reno took notice and showed up for practice one Saturday morning without Hickey knowing.
“I’m really big on figuring out the DNA of players we recruit, how they practice,” Reno says. “Do they really love football, or do they just play it? Because Dathan is so close, he probably had more scrutiny than other guys because I could just drive over. So I drove up, sat behind the stands and watched, and you could see everybody on the team rallied around him. Every play was full speed, 100 miles an hour. I knew everything we’d seen on film was true.”
Reno let Hickey know he wanted him to play for Yale, and Hickey, true to form, asked for a road map.
“When you hear Yale, you’re like, ‘Oh, wow,'” Hickey says. “So that was my first reaction, and when he told me they were interested, I said, ‘OK, what do I have to do?’ He said I’d have to get my SAT scores up, and on the day I came to a camp here, I got my SAT scores back, and they were high enough.”
Papazian got another text. “We’re in!”
“When you’re talking about a place as prestigious as Yale, it’s more than just a moment,” Papazian says. “It takes years. When it became a possibility, that was the track he wanted to be on. He’s just a real driven and focused kid, never the kind of kid to look for shortcuts or take the easy way out.”
When Hickey’s senior season began at Central, and Isaiah Miller’s injury left the Rams in need of a quarterback, Hickey stepped in and produced more than 2,400 yards of total offense, while making 48 tackles on defense. He also returned punts and kickoffs. And punted.
After signing his letter of intent in February 2018, Hickey, who played basketball in the winter, switched his spring sport from baseball to track and ended up in the State Open in the 100-meter dash, the long jump and 4×100 relay, helping set a school record in the latter.
So there was no doubt Yale had landed an exceptional, versatile athlete. As a freshman, Hickey played in seven games, making 28 tackles. In this sophomore season, he has played nearly every snap at free safety and has been in on 14 tackles, making two interceptions against Cornell on Sept. 28, and recovering a fumble to set up Yale’s third TD in a 48-24 win over Fordham at The Bowl last Saturday.
“He’s just scratching the surface of how good a player he’s going to be,” Reno says. “He’s going to be an incredible player. We give him some freedom to roam a little bit. He’s one of those guys you want on the field every snap defensively.”
Hickey shows up in the coaches’ office early each morning with a smile, Reno says, eager to watch film after giving everybody a hug. He talks of maybe becoming a player agent one day, but now he has the NFL in his sights, and he has his road map.
“I never settle,” Hickey says. “I never feel that I’m the best until I’m … the best. I just keep working, working on football, in the classroom and when I get there, I’ll know. I know if I want to get to the NFL like I say I do, coming from an FCS school, I have to put in the extra work to be that much better. I’m going to get my body right, get my skills right and, hopefully, by my senior year, when NFL scouts are here, they are here for me.”
Dom Amore can be reached at damore@courant.com.
