Aurora – A.C. Patterson has been tagging along with his father at work for years.
Work, for Andre Patterson, is a long list of NFL teams, including the Broncos, where he coached the defensive line the previous two seasons before being ushered out with the arrival of new defensive boss Jim Bates.
Now, Andre gets to tag along with A.C. to his place of work.
Work, for A.C., is Regis High School, where he is a 6-foot, 260-pound freshman with above-average grades who recently won the starting center job for the varsity football team.
With a year left on his Broncos contract, Andre is spending some rare free time as an assistant coach – primarily working with the offensive line – for the Class 5A Raiders.
“He’s usually gone all summer, well, during the whole year,” A.C. said of how cool it is to play for his dad. “It’s actually really good because he’s an expert at what he does and he gets to teach me every day.”
Andre knows he will be in the mix for a new NFL job come January, but said his time at Regis has breathed new life into him.
“It’s been a great experience for me,” said Andre, whose NFL coaching résumé includes stops with Cleveland, Dallas, Minnesota and New England. “It reminds you why you got into coaching – to help young kids. To be honest, those kids have done more for me than I’ve done for them.”
While no one knows if A.C. is the first freshman to be a starter at Regis, coach Mike Woolford knows A.C. is the first to start in his three seasons. As a matter of fact, in Woolford’s career, which includes 10 years at Cherry Creek, where the Bruins won five state titles and played in seven state championships, he never had given a starting position to a ninth-grader – not even phenom Darnell McDonald, now in professional baseball with the Minnesota Twins’ organization.
Count Andre surprised as well. He expected A.C. to be on the Raiders’ freshman squad when he agreed to be an assistant coach.
“He took charge,” Woolford said of A.C. “He makes the offensive line calls. He makes the blocks. He doesn’t make a lot of mistakes. He plays well beyond being a freshman.”
Credit that last bit to genetics and gettin’ after it.
Andre played center in high school and junior college before playing at the University of Montana. Andre’s abilities and the body he shaped in the weight room were passed down to his son.
Because of his size, A.C. always played on football teams with older kids until he was in eighth grade, which his father thinks accelerated A.C.’s competitiveness. Not long ago, A.C. fell in love with lifting weights and exercising.
The results have been, well, substantial.
A.C. bench presses 330 pounds, the most on the Regis squad, and squats 500, which ties him for third among the Raiders.
“To be honest with you, as his father, I’m surprised he has that kind of strength,” said Andre, who remembers maxing out the weight machines at his high school before he ever touched free weights in college.
And while A.C. is building himself into a formidable football player, Mom and Dad find greater pleasure in seeing their son mold himself into a better person who one day will be a man – even if he already is big enough to be mistaken as one.
Football, as Andre knows all too well through years of college and NFL coaching, can be taken away at any time.
“I’m more proud of the way he carries himself and the way he handles himself than how he plays on the football field,” Andre said of his son.
For A.C., who loves video games and would like to program them one day, his motivation is a little simpler.
“I try hard to impress my dad.”
