Delone Carter wrestles with Isaac Newton’s third law of motion. Even if it is a simple enough idea, for Carter, simplicity is not a word to use when describing how physics pertain to his life journey and football career.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Reaction is the entity which has engulfed the life and football career of Delone Carter.

Reaction is exactly the thing that became of Carter’s 2010 summer after he was suspended from the university and football team. Carter was independent. He remained in Akron, Ohio, reacting to what occurred last spring.

Carter was suspended from the team for allegedly punching a fellow Syracuse student in a snowball-throwing incident on Feb. 27. Carter was reinstated to the university and football team on Aug. 9 and will not serve a suspension for any games this coming season. His trial in Syracuse City Court is pending.

‘It just shapes the man that you are going to be,’ Carter said of the suspension. ‘Whatever comes in front of me, I am going to be able to handle.’

Carter has handled before. Carter has reacted before. He’s not new to situations like this. The past seven long years have been chock-full of Carter reacting.

He believes, whenever given the time to respond, he can mold it into opportunity. It became opportunity for him when he transferred across Akron from Archbishop Hoban High School to Copley High School as a 16-year-old. It became opportunity when coping with his dislocated hip while sitting out the entirety of the 2007 season. It became opportunity this past summer when months spent away from Syracuse, in Akron, marked the longest period of time Carter has spent with his 2-year-old son, Caden.

Heading into his final season, Carter is Syracuse’s No. 1 weapon and starting running back. In 2009, Carter amassed 1,021 rushing yards and 11 touchdowns. And now, Carter is banking on reaction breathing life into liberty yet again.

‘He went through some things that he had control over and some that he didn’t,’ said Robert White, Carter’s stepfather. ‘(He has) learned a valuable lesson from all of the things that he has gone through.’

Truth be told, situations like these Carter knows better than almost every other Division-I football player. He has traversed the hurdles before. But coming off the suspension, he knows this is his biggest hurdle yet.

Carter thinks he can succeed, as long as he can stay stable. For Carter, stability is the key. From the makeup and upkeep of his leviathan body, to his role as SU’s main threat, to fatherhood back in Akron. Maintaining a balance has always been Carter’s challenge. It’s an inherent challenge for an inimitable athlete and person.

It’s a test which correlates with what is most important to him: home. Home yields family. Family leads to faith. And faith is where Carter’s mindset and struggle truly resides…

 

Philippians 4:13, ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’

That is the devoutly religious Carter’s favorite Bible passage. He lives by the scripture.

For anyone who knows Carter, his faith is no secret. Syracuse strength and conditioning coach William Hicks — who has been with Carter longer than most of the Syracuse coaching staff — says Carter is thankful through his faith for the natural talent he was born with, the bullish body he had as that 16-year-old at Hoban.

‘The good Lord made Delone look the way he does the day we saw him,’ Hicks said. ‘Use his abilities for what would be the best, as opposed to what it would naturally be.

‘We put him in natural and unnatural positions.’

Natural and unnatural positions. Hicks simulates them where he and Carter can harness Carter’s God-given attributes in the football team’s weight room. The natural and unnatural positions Hicks and his partner, Hal Luther, put Carter in are planned. And they are all brewed with the goal of training Carter so that he doesn’t hurt himself.

Because, naturally, he would hurt himself. He has before. His muscles are just too dense. He is too much for himself to remain secure.

In the simulated unnatural situations, Carter becomes resolute. His body has been stable since devising these plans after the muscular balance around his hip was lost with the injury in 2007, Hicks said.

The schemed situations start with the Delone-specific training equipment Hicks and Luther bought solely for Carter: rubber bands and Physioballs. The most paramount of the stability workouts consists of a drill where Carter jumps onto the blow-up Physioball, straddles and clamps onto it with the insides of his knees. Carter then attempts to remain upright, clenching the ball with his legs, almost surfing it while training the muscles around his hips.

Luther compares strength coaching to teaching math: Two plus two will always equal four. But when strength coaching, two plus two doesn’t always equal four. When coaching Carter, the sum is ever-changing.

‘If you exert a force against it, it’s giving you a force back,’ Hicks said. ‘Part of speed training is what they call ‘ground-force contact’: The force given is the force received. Strike a surface, the more force you are going to get out of that surface.’

Metaphorically, the ‘ground-force contact’ in the weight room parlays with the physics and motion of Carter’s football career.

If you exert a force against it, it’s giving you a force back.

The force given is the force received.

And Hicks’ words speak directly to the situations Carter has faced.

His words speak directly to his suspension.

‘You kind of put yourself in an unnatural position in a controlled environment,’ Hicks said. ‘So that’s what happens in competition when you are in an uncontrolled environment: You’ve been there before.’

 

Been there before. Delone, White and Delone’s mother, April Carter-White, have been there before. Many times. Together.

But together is not where they were when Delone reacted to his lowest spiritual and emotional points of the past seven years.

The binding force between Delone and his parents has been an obvious one: the telephone. And conversations over the course of the time since Hoban tell the stories of how and when Delone has been in unnatural situations before.

How he has given a force back after being negatively exerted upon.

Through that medium, Robert, April and Delone have maintained and strengthened the bond forged through Delone’s football career. A bond conceived all the way back in 1992, when Delone was a 5-year-old about to be hooked on a game he was meant to play.

That game Delone was meant for was almost taken from him prior to his sophomore season at SU in 2007. Via phone, White informed Delone’s Akron football family that that game was perhaps ripped from his son forever due to the injury.

The force had been exerted.

‘It’s not good. I just got the phone call I didn’t want to get,’ White said to Delone’s coach at Copley, Dan Boarman.

It was the worst-case scenario. Looking back, it was a stark contrast to the cold call Boarman received when Delone was a high school sophomore in 2004. White’s number was unknown, but the outcome was undisputed success for Boarman.

It was that natural physics answer to the strife Delone was facing as a backup running back at Hoban. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and the reaction to Delone’s lack of playing time at Hoban was a transfer. It was an answer to the force Hoban inflicted on Delone.

It was a 16-year-old, 5-foot-10 force Boarman received.

Said Boarman: ‘(Delone) called me up and he said, ‘I would like to come to Copley.’ I said, ‘Do you live in the district?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘All I can offer you is a fair shake.”

With that, Delone’s career attained security at Copley. It took off, as he became Ohio’s Mr. Football in 2005. A freshman All-American year at SU in 2006 followed.

Then came the injury, and the continuation of the bond forged via phone communication.

The kid who had now grown into a man — the kid Boarman himself proclaims he wishes was his own son — was hurt.

Delone was down and out. But because of the unity between the Akron football family, Delone bounced back. He became SU’s starting running back once again in 2009, eliciting fear out of opposing Big East defenses. Louisville’s defense took a poll at the end of the year to choose the toughest opposing running back to face in the conference. They chose Carter.

But on April 14, Carter hit his lowest point yet. Carter and teammate Ryan Gillum were questioned by the Syracuse Police Department about the alleged incident, and Carter was charged with misdemeanor assault. The suspension followed.

Soon, he was back in Akron. Back home, searching for his reaction again.

But what Carter found as the force which helped him recover this last time was actually the closest thing to himself.

 

Pap Pap and Mi Mi were there for Carter when he returned to Akron in April. They were there with the person responsible for those nicknames for Robert White and April Carter-White, respectively — Caden.

Caden, Delone, Pap Pap and Mi Mi were back together. No telephone needed.

But a telephone was needed on Aug. 9, shortly after noon. That is when Delone called White to inform his father that he was officially reinstated.

Delone was back, and White needed to inform one person. An inaugural member of the phone chain: Doug Marrone.

‘The reason that I felt to call Coach Marrone as quickly as I did was because Marrone was very, very supportive of my son,’ White said.

With the phone call, Carter was on his way back to Syracuse, leaving Caden behind once again. But it came after an impromptu summer of balance, of father and son home in Akron.

If you ask White, despite the uncertainty around the suspension, his son was at his most stable with his son.

In any bout between an action and a reaction, balance is everything. The stability was a silver lining for Delone with Caden.

‘No one could take that bond from him,’ White said. ‘(Before the summer) it was a lot about Pap Pap and Mi Mi. Now, when Delone gets up to move, Caden is in his footsteps.’

 

Caden turns 3 on Oct. 2, the same Saturday his father will be off on an SU bye week.

The birthday celebration will come about a month after Carter’s homecoming Saturday, when Akron hosts Syracuse.

Caden, Pap Pap and Mi Mi will get to see their father and son return from the suspension just a mile and a half down Akron’s East Exchange Street from Hoban.

Carter will have come full circle, reacting subconsciously to the sudden actions of would-be tacklers on an Akron football field, just like he did seven years earlier as that 16-year-old at Hoban.

‘Akron is King,’ Carter said, pointing to a tattoo of Ohio on his arm. ‘That is where my heart is… somewhere I always feel safe going.’

But for Carter, now, he is able to grasp everything that has occurred within these last seven years better than he could have as a 16-year-old. Everything that has happened is a small part of it all.

With his last go-around at SU starting, it will be more of the same for Carter.

He has done it before. He does it every day in the weight room with Hicks and Luther. The ground is where it starts. And again, Carter has recovered from the initial blow of that ‘ground force contact,’ which divulges his story.

But, come Saturday, Carter believes he is done letting chance creep back into his life. He knows dads have to take fewer chances as time goes on.

And once it’s all over Saturday, the ground will be the place Carter will look toward to find his solution to it all. Anew.

There, Caden Carter will assuredly be smiling up at Dad.

It’s the one reaction Dad is looking forward to the most.

‘There will be no more butterflies. I’m too old for that,’ Carter said. ‘I am going to be so prepared that I can’t even be nervous. I’m not taking chances. I have to be all the way ready.’

aolivero@syr.edu

Published on September 1, 2010 at 12:00 pm