Coleman's incredible journey continues at Boston College

Eight years ago, Johnathan Coleman was a shivering, scared, abandoned 11-year-old boy living in a crack house in Connecticut, sleeping curled up with his baby brother on a ragged mattress wondering where his mother was and where his next meal would come from.

Two years ago, living in Radnor, which is light years from the hardcore streets of the Bronx where he grew up, Coleman had to be shown how to put on shoulder pads for the first time.

On Saturday, Coleman will be starting at wide receiver for Boston College in the Eagles' season opener against Weber State.

The strange and wonderful odyssey of the 2009 Radnor High graduate will continue to unfold before 44,500 maroon-clad fans in BC's Alumni Stadium. And sometime before the game, Coleman will steal away to a corner of the Eagles' locker room, close his eyes and reflect on where he was, where he is, and where he is going.

You can call Coleman the Boston Blind Side.

The 6-4, 214-pound redshirt freshman fell into that starting role by default, when junior wideout Colin Larmond (BC's leading returning receiver) suffered a season-ending knee injury on Aug. 21, but Coleman isn't complaining. He's learned through time to wrap his arms around the improbable. He just leans back on his tumultuous history - and occasionally pinches himself, wondering if this is really happening.

"I think about what I've gone through a lot; I'd say a lot more now than I ever have," said Coleman, who caught 34 passes for 489 yards and seven touchdowns his senior season at Radnor - the only year he played organized football. "I used to be angry about it. I wanted to forget. It helps to motivate me now. When I'm struggling with football or class work, I think about what I survived and I say to myself, 'I can do this.'"

Coleman has many friends at Boston College, though no one on the bucolic, Chestnut Hill, Mass., campus is aware of his story. And when classmates talk about how tough things are for them and how hard they had it growing up, Coleman stops himself from speaking up, often sitting back and grinning.

"I don't really like bringing my story up. These guys talk about their tough lives - and it does make me laugh sometimes," said Coleman, whose life changed through the New York ABC (A Better Chance) program that placed him in Radnor. "They have no idea what tough is."

If an excuse was what Johnathan Coleman wanted, he could have taken his pick. The list of wrongs in his childhood reads like a Chinese menu of family dysfunction: abject poverty, abandonment, inadequate housing, eating iceberg lettuce out of a sink.

"What amazed me, beyond never playing football before his senior year of high school then winding up at a Division I program, is that Johnathan had no reason at all to be the quality kid that he turned out to be," said Ryan Day, Boston College's wide receivers coach who recruited Coleman. "I kept telling him how hard this level of football would be, and he kept telling me he understood. I knew enough about him to know that he was a character kid. He's had more challenges than most people do in a lifetime."

Those challenges prepared Coleman for the foreign language of major Division I college football. Because of Coleman's football inexperience, Red Raiders coach Tom Ryan and his staff brought along Coleman with baby steps. At BC, it's been a completely new world.

"Johnathan's learning progression has been amazing," Day said. "He's showing signs on the field that he can play at this level, and he's only been playing the sport for 2 years. He's handled this situation well, being pushed into a role quickly that he didn't expect. But what I like most about him is that he doesn't like to be wrong. He'll ask questions. You tell him something, he absorbs it."

But it didn't come easy. There were moments of frustration, filled with plenty of doubt. Coleman would question himself whether he really made the right choice or not, if he truly belonged. He had trouble getting off jams. He needed to hone technique.

"It was frustrating at first because everyone knew so much more about the game than I did," Coleman recalled. "It took me a long time to learn the game. I didn't know the difference between cover-2, a cover-3 and a man-defense. There were so many things that were going through my head. It was tough, because I never, in my whole life, was discouraged playing sports. Last year at this time, I didn't think I made the right decision. But I stuck with it."

Coleman is carrying a 2.9 GPA and is majoring in arts and sciences, though he's thinking about changing his major to secondary education. He's on schedule to graduate a semester early, in December 2012, and then possibly graduate school. His maternal grandparents, Vaughn Coleman and Linda Williams, will take the trek up to BC this Saturday, along with Coleman's younger brother, 11-year-old Osiah Rivers, who is the same age Johnathan was when their mother, Vanci, dropped them off at the house in Connecticut.

Vanci, who served 6 months at Lakeview Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility in 2001 for transporting drugs over international lines, has made a complete change in her life, according to Coleman, who speaks to her every day.

"There's a lot of things my mother regrets," said Coleman, who never knew his father. "We can't go back and change things, but I can change my future. I kept hearing I wasn't supposed to get this chance to play until next year, or the year after that. Here's my chance - and it's now. I've been thinking about this for a long time. We'll see where football takes me." *