HANOVER — It’s been nearly two months since Ernest Evans II died, and Dartmouth College football coach Buddy Teevens still feels the shock of the news.
Evans, a 2016 Dartmouth graduate who played reserve quarterback for the Big Green, sustained a traumatic brain injury from an unexplained accident in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2017. Evans spent time rehabilitating in California and, later, at facilities and in his home in Houston. He appeared to be making gradual progress.
A seizure claimed Evans’ life on April 1. He was 25 years of age. Teevens and his associates continue to absorb the loss.
“The stunning shock was when he passed,” Teevens said on Wednesday from St. Augustine, Fla., where he continues to work while the college campus is closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. “There was a video two or three days before of him manipulating an obstacle course in his wheelchair. He was really making progress.
“He had some visual challenges, had a procedure and seemed to be working well; he was talking a little more. Such a wonderful, wonderful human being who touched everyone.”
From a competitive standpoint, Evans worked mostly in the background during his four years at Dartmouth. He had the misfortune of arriving at the same time as Dalyn Williams, the versatile quarterback and future NFL signee who led the Big Green to a share of its first Ivy League championship in two decades as a senior in 2015. Because of that, Evans spent his first two years on the junior varsity, getting some varsity snaps as a junior before transitioning to wide receiver as a senior.
It’s the person Evans was away from the field that sparks more memories.
“He worked through a number of injuries, but he was always positive, upbeat, enthusiastic, encouraging,” Teevens recalled. “Winning a championship was a big part of that. It’s hard talking about him in the past tense, of what he was and what he did. It brings back a little of the shock. His life was too short.”
An economics major, Evans was working for a reinsurance firm in Los Angeles and sharing an apartment with two former Dartmouth teammates at the time of his accident.
Evans didn’t return home from a June 11, 2017, birthday party at a Santa Monica lounge for one of his roommates and was later discovered unresponsive on a nearby roadway.
With no sign of a struggle or attempted robbery and with Evans still in possession of his wallet, phone and school ring, Santa Monica police ultimately ruled the incident an accident with no foul play involved.
“His accident was heartbreaking,” Dartmouth defensive coordinator and linebackers coach Don Dobes said in a Wednesday phone interview from his New Jersey home, “and his death was, too.”
Dobes connected with Evans’ father, Ernest Evans Sr., during the recruitment process. The two had known each other for years, dating back to the mid-1980s when Dobes was arriving to coach football at Houston’s Rice University as the elder Evans was graduating after playing defensive back for the Owls.
The relationship gave Dobes an opening in the recruiting process, “but Ernest came to Dartmouth because he fell in love with Dartmouth,” Dobes said.
Evans’ class had a lot of personalities in it; while Williams was a leader on the field, he tended to be soft-spoken away from it. Evans, with his ebullient attitude, filled the gap.
“Ernest was always one of the leaders on offense, an energizer,” Dobes said. “He’s the guy that would do a great job of encouraging other players, challenging them and being there to work with them. The kid was a tireless worker.”
The Evans family kept his former coaches up to speed on Ernest’s recovery through texts, emails and videos, Dobes added. Family members attended to him through his rehabilitation efforts.
In eulogizing his son, Evans Sr. recalled an athlete who was talkative, opinionated and never afraid of the grunt work of school or football.
“We’re going to miss Erno because, for him to have given us 25 years, he gave us 50 years because he did so much in the time,” Evans Sr. said in a video recording of the April 17 funeral. “If you’d known Ernest, no matter what the odds were, he would always be willing to challenge those odds and go up that slope and grind it out. I really believe and know a lot of his Dartmouth family had an opportunity to see that.”
The pandemic kept Teevens from attending the service — the virus limited the funeral to family only, but Teevens and his wife watched it online, he said — and it continues to throw a wrench in the Big Green head coach’s regular routine. However, both he and Dobes expect the program to remember Evans in some fashion once a return to action is secured.
“As services of that sort can go, it was as uplifting as you can hope for,” Teevens said. “Just to hear some of the stories and to hear his brothers and sisters speak was tough and moving.”
In addition to his father, Evans left behind his mother, Sonya, and four siblings: Jamar, Faith, Emerald and Ezekiel.
On the day of his funeral, Evans lay in a casket adorned with a Dartmouth banner.
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com or 603-727-3226.