In the Game - All-American Engineer
By Jerry Bembry
As a running back for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NSBE member DeRon Brown was a top athlete in Division III.
As he maneuvers through the walkways from one class building to the next, NSBE member DeRon Brown does so with a little swagger. The confident strut is well-earned: To his coaches and teammates, he’s been all-everything; to the members of the league that he terrorized over four years, he’s been all-conference; and in the eyes of football observers impressed by his being the nation’s second best rusher the past two seasons, he’s been All-American.
That football resume, at most colleges, would have earned Brown “Big Man on Campus” status. But at MIT — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — no one seems to notice or even care about his football exploits as one of the nation’s top Division III athletes. As a computer science and engineering major, Brown’s simply known as a…
…Nerd? Brown laughs as he’s confronted with the “N” word.
“Yes, I get that all the time,” Brown says. “There’s more to the school than the image that’s out there.”
Three-Sport Star
As a junior, he set the school’s single-season rushing record, with 1,816 yards (181 yards per game). Despite facing opponents who often put nine defenders in the box to stop him
, Brown kept running wild as a senior, with 267 yards against UMass–Dartmouth and 246 yards against Salve Regina University. If not for a concussion six minutes into his last game, he might have won the Division III rushing title.
“Only injury of my life,” Brown says. “But I dealt with the hits all year. Everybody tried to keep me from getting big numbers.”
It was the same way in high school, where Brown was a three-sport star at Grayson County High School in Independence, Va. He had offers to play football at all of the Ivy League schools and several scholarship offers at other I-AA schools. But Brown knew he wanted to be an engineer, and his college search focused on schools that would give him the best education.
“MIT was the best,” Brown says. “So that’s where I wanted to go.”
Engineer First
Brown hopes to attract the eyes of NFL scouts, but he balances his love for sports with a focused desire to use his computer science and engineering degree to become the next famous software engineer.
“If I could get the opportunity to play at the next level, that would be great,” Brown says. “But unlike guys at big schools who go to college to play football, we attend MIT to become engineers. It’s a great fallback plan.”
There’s no doubt that he’ll have a long list of suitors, among them, the software start-up www.starstreetsports.com. The company’s site enables sports fans to buy and sell stockin players, with the value tied to the players’ performance.
“I love the concept, and I think it’ll be a great opportunity for me,” Brown says.
But with an MIT education, he’s in a position to be selective.
“MIT has been the best educational environment for me,” Brown says. “It’s challenged me, but it’s also prepared me for life after school. I feel like I’ll be able to handle any job that I want….
“The education has been great,” Brown says. “Everything that I accomplished on the football field was just a big bonus.”
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