DeaMonte Trayanum and his family prepare for their next chapter

AKRON, Ohio -- From the front door of his two-story, white-paneled suburban Akron home lined with a small forest and a trimmed lawn, DeaMonte Trayanum’s room is up the wooden stairs and a short walk down the upstairs hallway.

He emerges from the basement -- there was laundry to attend to before he could play video games -- and leads the way. He pushes the door ajar and turns his head, warning he hasn’t cleaned up in a while before fully swinging it open.

The lights flick on. Chucked up clothes and tossed around sheets lay on his bed, which sits against the far wall. His bed runs parallel to the monstrous television housed on a dark stand. There’s a lengthy black rug in between, a blue exercise ball on the left side of his door and an orange muscle roller near the head of his bed.

A framed photo of himself and a teammate from last year’s state championship game leans against the gray wallpaper and blocks out most visibility of a framed picture of LeBron James, Akron’s prodigal son. A pair of James’ shoes are scattered on the carpet near his closet, as are a pair of special Nike shoes he was given at Nike’s The Opening camp.

“Pick them up,” he says. “They’re super light.”

The Arizona State running back commit eventually settles into a comfortable position on the side of his bed, fires up his PlayStation 4 and hands over a controller. As the screen loads, he reaches back by his pillows and grabs a black hand gripper. It’s set to 90 pounds of resistance, the maximum, and is put to use by Trayanum every night before he dozes off.

But, for now, he sleeps on his couch in the living room. His bed isn’t offering enough support, which has caused him to wake with aching hips. So his room has turned into a bit of a clutter, offering only a place to store clothes and play video games.

He recently picked up Madden 20, and as he often does, Trayanum is playing as the Atlanta Falcons, his favorite team. Expected from a running back, he’s not a huge fan of throwing the ball, choosing instead to run the ball up the middle with Devonta Freeman. And early on, he’s not having a ton of success.

A few minutes into the game, Trayanum’s uncle, George Cameron, comes up from the basement and introduces himself. He has a long face and a black beard cut down to about the length of his hair. He offers his left hand out to shake because his right is wrapped up with a blue bandage.

Cameron has an Ohio State lanyard hanging out of his right pocket and keys dangling from an Arizona State lanyard that hangs around his neck.

And in one picture, it is perfectly illustrated the dilemma and opportunity Trayanum and his family have endured. Ohio State was in his backyard. He had the chance to stay home, to star at a blue-blood program, to probably win quite a lot of football games. In essence, most kid’s dream.

But Trayanum’s dream was never most kid’s dream. He wanted change. He wanted to forge a happier future for him and his family -- whether or not that future included football. He wanted to find where he could earn the most equity -- in football and in life. He wanted to move 2,000 miles away and play at Arizona State.

The idolized picture of success waltzed in front of DeaMonte Trayanum. He had about three buttons undone. The sleeves of his nice dress shirt were rolled up, oozing a “glow to him like people have in movies,” Trayanum said. Forget that Brian DeCenzo was rich. He looked rich -- and that got Trayanum’s attention.

DeCenzo, a Goldman Sachs Managing Director and Hoban alum, came to speak to Jason Dzik’s entrepreneurship class a few weeks back. The class -- which Dzik said is not an intro to business class but instead has talked about building empathy, projecting confidence, public speaking and “21st-Century life skills” -- is Trayanum’s favorite.

“It opened my head up,” he said.

Most people want to talk about Trayanum’s football ability -- and there’s a lot to talk about. The 6-foot, 210-pound running back ran for 1,313 yards and 26 touchdowns on just over 100 carries his junior year. He’s won three state championships in three years. He looks like a bruising linebacker yet plays tailback and safety, running with the grace and swiftness of a rabbit. He runs past defenders like a Lamborghini and over them like a Mack Truck.

Even his nickname, ‘Chip,’ which everyone at Hoban refers to him as, was derived from Trayanum’s football prowess. One of his youth football coaches began to tell Trayanum he looked like a blue-chip prospect, a blue-chipper. The name stuck.

When Dzik speaks of Trayanum, whom he only referred to as ‘Chip’, however, he speaks mostly of Trayanum the student.

For eight minutes, he doesn’t lose a smile, delighted and ardent to speak about ‘Chip.’ He calls him “an awesome student,” mentioning how he shows his confidence while remaining humble -- both outside of school and in an entrepreneurship class.

Dzik says the class’s first pitch project is quickly approaching. He told his students to look at the Hoban community. What problems are there? What can you do for people here? They were tasked with developing a product or service to benefit the school’s students. It’s essentially forming an idea for a business.

Trayanum, at the moment, is between two pitches. One is a locker cleaning service where students would pay $10 a month and have their lockers cleaned out weekly. The other is an after-school lunch program for athletes, which would provide students with wraps and sandwiches for $3. That one was conjured up from Trayanum’s experiences. He’s always hungry before practice and not too fond of the school lunches -- he would be the business owner and a frequent customer.

“I said, ‘That’s a great idea,’” Dzik said. “By 3 o’clock, (kids) are hungry and they have 45 minutes before football practice. Give them something simple, some quick carbs. I think that’s great.”

When the class began this August, Dzik knew Trayanum was a highly-touted athlete. He figured, like others before Trayanum, the running back was going to be arrogant, never letting a person go by without telling them how good he was.

Instead, Dzik said, “He doesn’t talk about it.”

On the first day of class, the two had a conversation about family, bonding over the shared feeling of growing up under families that hold high expectations. Of not wanting to let people down. Of becoming more upset with failure than joyful over successes.

When Trayanum first floated that he had a 3.7 GPA, he followed it up by saying it should probably be much higher, if not for a 3.5 while adjusting to Hoban’s curved grading scale in his freshman year. He’s very high on academics, which is part of the reason he chose ASU, drawn toward the idea of graduating in three years and having his master’s degree in four.

He’s undecided about what major he’ll declare, mentioning he may start school in Tempe undecided. He dabbled with the idea of marine biology or computer science, but less than two months into Dzik’s class, he’s leaning towards marketing -- fond of exploring different ways to make money.

“That is a big part of entrepreneurship we try to teach, is you don’t have to go this nine-to-five, work-for-money-kind-of job. Build something. Build a business. Build an empire.”

*****

Trayanum is sitting on the edge of his bed, now completely dialed into this Madden game after falling behind late in the game. His emotions hardly change throughout. No yelling when he throws a pick, no screaming when Matt Ryan can’t outrun a defender, no cheering when he gets the 15-14 win.

The closest he comes to trash talk is when he utters, “I don’t know what you’re going to pick but I just know it’s not going to work.”

He has his black hoodie over his head and keeps tapping on his skull with his fist. It’s not to get his brain juices flowing; his head just itches. He just got his short dreads done and they’re still irritated. Picking at it will ease his discomfort for a moment, but it may become troublesome in the future.

So, he taps on his scalp. He taps because, in the future, it will make his life easier.

Trayanum doesn’t take many situations at face value. He looks down the road, how decisions he makes now will impact him in one year, in 10, in 50. There’s always one eye on the present and one eye on the future.

He starts to explain that his messy room is only temporary, that when he’s in college, with roommates and no option to sleep on a couch, he’ll be clean. He says he has kind of already determined his housing situation in a year or so -- it’ll be him, freshman quarterback Ethan Long, freshman defensive back Jordan Clark and someone else in a house.

Then he started to ponder the possibilities of what a house offers. He could invest in the stock market -- not Apple or Microsoft he argues, there’s no value there, but potentially in small companies. And instead of just renting a house in Tempe, what if he bought it then rented it out once he left college.

“I kind of think outside the box,” he said.

Trayanum has always been devising different ways to save money or score a luxury he wanted. Whether it was being extra nice for months and flooding his mom with information on the newest iPhone to land it, or game sharing with his friends so that he can play every video game they buy through their gaming system.

But it was again houses that factored into his decision to choose ASU over his hometown Ohio State and others. He figured the place he committed to, the place he played college football at and studied at, would likely be the place he’d buy his first home. He and his family did not want that to be in Ohio.

Asked if they weren’t big fans of Ohio, Trayanum and his mom, Shereefa Cameron, both shrugged. Asked if they both wanted to leave the Buckeye State, they nodded definitively.

Yet, Trayanum still considered Ohio State. He’s visited the campus more times than he could count. Before becoming head coach, Ryan Day was Trayanum’s lead recruiter, the two built a good bond. He also liked Ohio State running backs coach Tony Alford as a person but “felt iffy about him as a coach.”

Still, most star Ohio high school running backs eventually don the scarlet and grey. They want to become the next Eddie George or Ezekiel Elliot.

Trayanum, though, holds more equity in different areas.

The Hoban senior mentioned an exercise DeCenzo did with Dzik’s entrepreneurship class. He asked them to pretend they were starting an ice cream shop. They needed to come up with the store’s theme, its location, an advertising plan and determine whether it would be profitable.

As he finishes up describing the ice cream exercise, a thought is offered up to Trayanum.

Do you think you’re building a brand with yourself?

A gargantuan, radiant smile formed on his face. His braces, with orange bands, shined.

“Yeah,” he said, pondering the thought with jubilation.

*****

Cameron is standing in front of four food-laden white tables under a pop-up tent in a fenced-off dirt parking lot adjacent to Archbishop Hoban High School’s football stadium. It’s on an incline, which allows Cameron to watch his nephew play and continue the tailgate well past halftime.

Hoban, which is considered the best team in Ohio, is playing Saint Ignatius, a Cleveland high school also considered to be a Top 5 squad in the state. Cameron has gone in and out of the stadium a couple of times before the half. There’s a sign on the fence that reads “No Re-Entry” but no attendant manning the gate.

Apparently, this is the norm. A few parents have already poured an adult beverage into a plastic cup and walked into the game. Cameron and his buddies are pouring Modelo canned beer into cups and passing around Black and Mild cigars, sharing their favorite memories of Trayanum.

In the middle of one of Cameron’s stories, which included the time Trayanum scored nine touchdowns on 10 touches in a youth game, ‘Chip’ interrupted. On the far side of the field from where his uncle was stationed, Trayanum broke a few tackles and housed a 37-yard screen pass. Hundreds of feet away, Cameron needed confirmation before celebrating.

“DeaMonte Trayanum takes it to the house,” the Hoban public address announcer said.

“Oh yeah,” Cameron yelled, running back and forth on the small incline while constantly pumping his fist. “Oh yeah!”

The commotion brought out an older spectator from behind his car. The man peered over to the field then asked the tailgate, “Did the kid score again? Man, he’s too much.”

The group that stuck around agreed. It was a DeaMonte Trayanum cheering section, chock-full of Cameron’s friends who watched and helped Trayanum grow up in Akron.

There was Cameron’s cousin, Dave Cameron, Willie Johnson -- who was introduced as “Big Willie” -- Austin Clopton and Thomas Shaw, who helped coach and mentor Trayanum when he was a kid. “We groomed him,” Cameron said.

Perhaps, in a way, they groomed his football potential into what it has become. More so, though, they groomed his psyche. In an area where Cameron saw firsthand the city’s best athletes sabotage their futures with dumb missteps, he wanted to make sure his nephew always had a crowd looking out for him.

Cameron was once a great athlete in his own right. He went to the The University of Akron to play linebacker from 1995 to 1999, teammates with NFL Hall of Famer Jason Taylor during his first two seasons. He then played for the Carolina Rhinos of the now-defunct AF2, the Arena Football League’s developmental league.

Still figuring out how far he could take football, Cameron received a call from his sister, Shereefa. She was pregnant with a boy. Later he learned their mom had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. He returned to Akron and hasn’t left since -- most of Trayanum’s family hasn’t.

But in Trayanum choosing to play college football in Arizona, his family plans to follow him to the Valley, to begin a new adventure of their own as he embarks on his college journey.

“Family is everything,” Cameron said. “That’s why we’re all moving out (to Arizona). Once he started blowing up in football, we’re going. That’s what we said. We want to be his support system.”

*****

Trayanum and Shereefa sit down in a bar-area booth. Their backs to the door, they pick up the BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse menu, scouring and flipping through the pages like a high school yearbook.

Shereefa stays rather quiet as she reads through the options. Trayanum, on the other hand, becomes excited and even more confused with every item he sees. The pizza looks good but he’s really craving wings. The shrimp tacos look amazing but the sandwiches come with fries.

Then he thinks about cutting his losses and ordering two entrees. After all, he’ll finish both of them. On the eve of what became Hoban’s 42-41 loss to St. Ignatius, Hoban’s first loss in 31 games, Trayanum wasn’t worried about creating a specific night-before meal. Not the type for food-related superstitions, he’ll eat anything.

His only problem, he claims, is he never gets full. The last time he remembers truly being stuffed was in May. One of the dinner stops on his ASU official visit was Fogo de Chao, the Brazilian Steakhouse chain in Scottsdale.

It was Trayanum, Shereefa, Long, offensive coordinator Rob Likens, his wife, running backs coach Shaun Aguano, his wife and daughter, analyst Derek Hagan, recruiting operations team member Lisa Ben-Chaim, a development coach whose named slipped Trayanum’s mind and his wife.

The meats kept showing up at the 12-person table, and Trayanum kept eating. In fact, he ate often on his visit -- most recruits do. Long, his player host, took him to In-N-Out Burger in Scottsdale, his first time trying the West Coast staple. On the other night, a large ASU contingent took Trayanum and his mom to Mastro’s Steakhouse. One morning, they were invited to Herm Edwards’ apartment for a breakfast.

It was less than a month earlier, Trayanum said he was told, that Edwards barged into a meeting room, threw Trayanum’s film on the big screen and remarked to his coaches, “Wherever this kid is, go get him.”

Soon after, Aguano was on the phone with the four-star prospect from Akron, flying out to meet him a week later. Aguano greeted his future running back for the first time at the Hoban campus, arriving the same day as Notre Dame offensive coordinator, and former ASU tight ends coach, Chip Long. But, as Trayanum was quick to note, Aguano had to travel much farther.

“You’re not going to go from Arizona to Ohio if you’re not (serious),” Trayanum said.

ASU was, indeed, serious. With junior running back Eno Benjamin likely heading to the NFL after the 2019 season, the Sun Devils needed his replacement. If they had to fly to Akron to get it, so be it.

Trayanum and his mom were on a flight from Canton to the desert a few weeks after Aguano’s visit. Their eyes lit up with fascination and amazement as the Arizona mountains became visible through the airplane window. This was perhaps the furthest thing from Ohio, and the pair relished in it.

While Ethan Long was offering Trayanum a tour of Tempe, Shereefa was making the most of her first trip to the West Coast. She went and hiked “A” Mountain, bewildered that there were other people doing the same. That would never happen in Ohio, she thought.

“(People) were actually enjoying outside,” she said. “You see people actually out and enjoying life, just living the best.”

At Edwards’ apartment along Tempe Town Lake, Trayanum committed to Arizona State, keeping it silent until he fulfilled his obligations to other schools. By the end of the visit, Trayanum and Shereefa were hooked. They saw their next chapter.

*****

Shereefa had just put in her order for chimichurri chicken with sweet potato fries and tempered cauliflower before the conversation swings back to Arizona. When Trayanum early enrolls at ASU in December, Shereefa will help her son move in then dart off for a few days of house-hunting for a home she plans to move into in May.

She floats the names of four cities -- Avondale, Glendale, Peoria , and Surprise -- and asks for an opinion on each, with questions at the top of every mother’s checklist. How’s the school system? Do other families live there? Is it safe? Moving to a health care hub with a degree in health care administration, finding a job isn’t a concern of hers.

Along with DeaMonte’s grandmother and great-grandmother, Shereefa will be making the move with her 10-year old daughter, Syncere. It’s for her that she wants to live in a suburban area, far, but not too far from her son.

“I was always going to be close by because I wanted to see his games,” she said. “Not too close to where I’m smothering him. I don’t want him to feel that way.”

Shereefa has lived in Ohio most of her life, growing up in Lyons, Ohio -- a town of less than 600 -- with Cameron. She always saw the West Coast on television and movies, it looked more alive. “Maybe it’s just because they have more sun all the time and they say the more sun people get, the happier they are,” she said.

Most people in northeast Ohio, Shereefa said, complain that they live there. They talk about leaving the cold, about someday heading west and starting anew only to never leave. When Arizona State contacted them, Shereefa and Trayanum saw a new door open up.

They envisioned a life surrounded by sunshine and saguaros. There was no more snow. They were active and happy. Their next generation of kin could be West Coasters. Instead of wanting to go visit relatives, their relatives would want to come to visit them. Maybe when football’s over, Trayanum would settle down there. Maybe he could open a business there.

Trayanum’s recruitment was not about what school would allow him the most snaps, or what school gave him the best chance of winning a national championship. He looked at where he and his family could have the best life.

As DeCenzo told him, location is one of the biggest parts of creating equity -- and Trayanum treated his recruitment like the ice cream shop.

Now he’s just hoping it’s profitable.

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