Brothers in Christ
Sam Hartman and Tom Hager
In Partnership with Athletes For God
Even now, I still get the chills just thinking about it.
There's nothing like Game Day here at Wake Forest. When you walk into that locker room, it's hard not to get excited. First there's your jersey, with your name on it, waiting for you at your locker. Then when you put on your pads and helmet, and make that first jog out into BB&T Stadium, you can feel the tension start to rise. With every passing minute, more and more fans arrive until you look up and suddenly the bleachers are covered in black and gold.
I still remember being on the field last year for warmups, during my freshman season, and having the thought occur to me.
Wow. This is what I get to do the next four years.
My game day routine never changes, no matter who the opponent is. I'll put on my eye black, sometimes in the shape of a cross. We'll follow our mascot out to the entrance of a stadium, and wait behind a black gate for our moment to come. Once he rides out on a motorcycle and we rush onto the field, I'll head over to the end zone and say a quick prayer. For safety. For clarity of mind. For thanks. And to play with the abilities God has given me.
But there's one other ritual I do every game. One that I'll do as long as I can play this game.
I put the initials D.A. on my wristband.
My name is Sam Hartman, and I'm the quarterback here at Wake Forest, but those initials aren't for me. They're for my brother, Demitri. He may have had a different last name than me, and we may not have shared a blood line, but he was a brother in every sense of the word.
And when you love someone like you love a brother, it hurts just as much not having him here anymore.
I can still remember November 11, 2015 like it was yesterday.
I remember every detail of that day...It was a Thursday, two days before the State Championship game, and our team was doing our last walk through before the game. I remember it was my sophomore year in high school, and I remember wearing a cutoff t-shirt to practice that day.
As I stood at the 45-yard-line of our practice field, I was preparing for the biggest game of my life. I can't say it was just a normal day, because it wasn't every day you played for a state title. And then moments later, I suddenly didn't care about football at all.
I stood on that practice field as the news was relayed to me that Demitri Allison had died.
The young man that my family had taken in when I was 12 years old was suddenly gone. The same brother that had ran routes for me and was my biggest fan was suddenly gone.
I left the practice field right then and there. I remember driving home and just being in shock. We have a dock that overlooks this lake at our house, and I went out to the edge of the dock and just looked out over the water, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
And that was one of the hardest parts, because there wasn't anyway you could make sense of it.
Demitri always had a smile that lit up the room. I never saw him down, probably because he was so focused on everybody else. He always seemed to brighten up your day, and he was just the coolest person to be around. Whenever you were struggling with something, Demitri was usually the cure to your problems.
And yet the nicest guy in the world was responsible for taking his own life.
I sat there on the dock, and I told myself that there is a plan. Sometimes we don't know what the plan looks like, but God has a light at the end of the tunnel. Even if the light is so dim that some of us - like Demitri - can't even see it, that light is still there.
At some point that evening, my thoughts eventually gravitated back toward the situation around me. I had dozens of teammates who were playing in a state championship in 48 hours, and they needed a quarterback to lead them. My coach told me that I didn't have to play in the game, but I knew the Lord had given me the ability to play football, and I didn't think my brother would want me to waste the opportunity.
So with a heavy heart and my mind on Demitri, I took the field. But on that night I didn't just write his initials on my wristband - I took the field wearing Demitri's old # 10 jersey.
I've been wearing it ever since. Considering how I played that night, I don't plan on changing numbers ever again.
If someone were to ever ask me what was the best game I ever played, it would be that night.
We were facing a really good Charlotte Latin High School team, and even though I didn’t put up the biggest numbers of my career, it was about as close to a perfect game as I think I've ever gotten. By the time the final seconds ticked off, our team had won 31-13.
Normally this would be a cause for celebration, but that just wasn't the case. I just wasn't in the mood to celebrate when I was still grieving the loss of my brother. In fact, it would take me a little while before things started to feel normal again.
But one thing that did help me was my faith.
My brother and I both came across the Bible verse Ecclesiastes 3:1-15, and it spoke to both of us. I shared it with my mom, and my brother even got a tattoo of it.
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time.
There's not a right or wrong way to grieve the loss of someone...it's okay to be sad, but it's also okay to also smile again. Everything will happen in its due time. In my case, one thing that helped brighten my spirits came that following summer, before my junior year started.
Wake Forest was offering me a scholarship to play football.
I wasn't highly recruited at that point, but Wake Forest saw something in me that other schools didn't. When somebody puts their trust in you like that, it means a lot, and I decided to commit to WFU before ever playing another down. It didn't matter that they were coming off a pair of 3-9 seasons...this was the place I wanted to be.
I didn't know it at that point, but that loyalty was actually about to be put to the test. And looking back, the WFU coaching staff passed with flying colors.
Just a few weeks after I signed my letter of intent, I could tell that something was feeling off with my left shoulder, and eventually that pain made its way to my neck. The swelling in my throat got so bad that I couldn't eat. By the time doctors diagnosed I had a thyroid issue and performed surgery, I had lost 24 pounds. I didn't look or feel like the quarterback Wake Forest had signed.
And yet the staff at WFU checked in on me all the time. They never once wavered on their commitment to me, and that has never been lost on me to this day.
I was able to put up big numbers as a junior, but I wasn't heading anywhere besides Winston-Salem. Now all I needed was to finish out my senior year before I could step foot on the WFU campus.
Ironically enough, even though I knew where I was playing as a college freshman, I didn't have a team for my senior year in high school.
Despite the fact our team won a state championship in 2015, by 2017 Davidson Day High School didn't have enough players to put a team together.
Not only did I not have a team to play for, my coach suddenly didn't have a job helping young football players. He moved down to Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, to coach Oceanside High School. And after debating on whether I should sit out my senior season or play, I moved down to Mount Pleasant and followed him.
But this wasn't just any coach...this was Chad Grier. He helped turn his son, Will Grier, into an NFL draft pick. In his five years at Davidson Day High School, he went to the state title game each year and won four of them. So I decided I should follow him to Oceanside High School.
Even if they were 0-8 the previous season.
I remember I arrived in Mount Pleasant about two months before the season started, and I could tell we had our work cut out for us. In the first practice I threw about 50 passes and completed maybe three of them.
But once again I put my trust in God, and His plan. If there really was a time to tear down and a time to build, as the Bible verse says, I think I witnessed it that season. It took time to develop chemistry with our receivers, but eventually we started to click, and we won 7 games. Maybe it wasn't a state championship, but considering where we had come from, it's still a huge accomplishment.
I graduated that winter so I could enroll early at Wake Forest. I was the only student graduating that December, so I had the unique honor of graduating at both the top and bottom of my class. However you looked at it, I was finally going to become a Demon Deacon.
I earned the starting job in time for the season opener, which turned out to be one of the craziest games of our season.
The game started as a defensive struggle as we went into halftime with a 7-0 lead, but I knew I was going to have to give our defense more help than that. Tulane came back with a pair of touchdowns in the third quarter to go up 14-10, but we didn't quit.
My teammate Alex Bachman - a senior - created some separation and I found him in the end zone to put us back up 17-14. Tulane tied it in the closing minutes to force overtime, but our team never caved under the pressure. We knew that we still had an overtime to play, and when Tulane got the ball first our defense came up big.
Instead of giving up any ground, they pushed Tulane back 15 yards and out of field goal range. When it was our turn, we slowly and methodically moved our way down the field, converting a pair of crucial third downs. And when Cade Carney ran it in from a yard out for the touchdown, we were officially 1-0 on the season.
It was the kind of moment you dream about as a kid...leading your team to a victory on the road. It was just a surreal moment, and when I look back at the film from that game, I still think to myself...wow, that actually happened.
That was definitely one of the highs in a season that saw plenty of lows too. At one point we lost four out of five games, including a 63-3 loss against Clemson, but I made sure to stay strong.
Whenever I would go back in the weight room, and I was fighting for one last rep, Demitri served as all the extra motivation I would need. I know he would have loved to be down here playing football too, and since I was blessed with the opportunity of playing here, Demitri would want me to make the most of it.
During that stretch, I just had to remember that this whole thing is bigger than me. Yes, I was struggling, but there was a whole group of guys that were counting on each other to stay strong, and we did.
The next week we played one of our best games of the year when we beat Louisville 56-35. I was able to avoid any interceptions, and as an offense, we were firing on all cylinders. But before the season ended I had to pass one final test.
This may sound hard to believe, but when I broke my leg last season against Syracuse, I didn't know it right away.
I knew something was off, but I actually thought I would be okay. I stayed in the game for three more plays so we could finish our drive, and it was only when I got the x-ray taken that I realized my leg was broken. And just like that my season was over.
Jamie Newman took over as the starting quarterback, and he guided our team to three wins over our last four games. The first win was maybe the most exciting of all. We were playing No. 14 N.C. State on the road, and trailed 23-13 with just over six minutes to go. Jamie hit Greg Dortch for a touchdown to pull within 23-20, and after our defense forced a turnover on downs with 1:39 to go, we had one last chance.
In that moment I wasn't jealous of Jamie or thinking about my broken leg, I was just cheering for our team to win. And I watched as Jamie put together a heroic drive. He drove our team to the 32-yard line with just 37 seconds to go when the Wolfpack called for an all-out blitz on Jamie. And when he found our tight end Jack Freudenthal up the middle, there was nobody in front of him. And just like that we had pulled off the upset.
We would beat Duke in the regular season finale to qualify for a bowl game, and then we beat Memphis 37-34 to finish the season at 7-6.
Jamie had helped me become the quarterback I am today, and I was so happy to see the way he performed at the end of last year. I know that I wasn't out there for those games, but I came here to help Wake Forest win. And whether that meant encouraging Jamie or pointing out what I was seeing from the sidelines, I was going to do my part.
I've been back with the team since January, and we're just finishing up our spring ball workouts now. It's been great to be back out there with my teammates, building that chemistry and envisioning what next season is going to look like.
I don't know if next year is a time for happiness or a time for sorrow, and I don't if next year will be a season of winning or a season of losing. All I know is that with Demitri’s initials on my wrist and his number on my jersey, I'm going to give it everything I have.
There's always a time for that.